The Message of Liberty

"Nothing is so galling to a people, not broken in from the birth, as a paternal or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read and say and eat and drink and wear."

Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay

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

Justice Louis D. Brandeis

"I repeat … that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist."

Benjamin Disraeli

"A people that values it's privileges above its principles soon loses both .Dwight D. Eisenhower
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

Benjamin Franklin

"In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."

Alexander Hamilton

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it."

Thomas Jefferson

"What more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more ... a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from labor the bread it has earned."

Thomas Jefferson

"We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles."

David Mamet

"Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

George Washington

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

Thomas Jefferson

"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

"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it."

Woodrow Wilson