 ...the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
Thomas Jefferson
A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
Thomas Jefferson
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Jefferson.html
For thousands of years men have been writing the real Bible, and it is being being written from day to day, and it will never be finished while man has life.
Robert Ingersoll
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Protestant church, not by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
Thomas Paine
Appreciation is a wonderful thing: it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
http://www.arches.uga.edu/~jpetrie/Voltaire.html
It is a popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
Edmund Burke
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Burke.html
[The marketplace] obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success.
Edmund Burke
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Burke.html
Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.
Edmund Burke
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Burke.html
Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing on others, he has a right to do for himself . . . all men have equal rights; but not to equal things.
Edmund Burke
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Burke.html
No nation was ever ruined by trade.
Benjamin Franklin
Essays
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Gotthold Lessing
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
Jonathan Swift
Critical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind
Admonish your friends privately, but praise them openly.
Publilius Syrus
Maxims
'Tis true that I know much, but I would like to know everything.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last possible improvement in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
But a government in which the majority rule in all cases can not be based on justice . . . Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?
Henry David Thoreau
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Thoreau.html
When you put your faith in big government, you end up an apologist for mass murder.
Karl Hess
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Karl_Hess.html
In a laissez-faire society, there could exist no public institution with the power to forcefully protect people from themselves. From other people (criminals), yes. From one's own self, no.
Karl Hess
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Karl_Hess.html
The radical and revolutionary view of the future of nationhood is, logically, that it has no future, only a past—often an exciting one, and usually a historically useful one at some stage. But lines drawn on paper, on the ground or in the stratosphere are clearly insufficient to the future of mankind.
Karl Hess
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Karl_Hess.html
...danger confronts us...the prevalence of a popular disposition to expect from the operation of the Government especial and direct individual advantages.
Grover Cleveland
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Grover_Cleveland.html
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire
That which moves not forward, goes backward.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/goethe2.html
To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/goethe2.html
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice...moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.
Karl Hess
Speech for Barry Goldwater
Our citizens have the right to protection from the incompetency of public employees...
Grover Cleveland
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Grover_Cleveland.html
The Declaration of Independence is so lucid we're afraid of it today. It scares the hell out of every modern bureaucrat, because it tells them there comes a time when we must stop taking orders.
Karl Hess
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Karl_Hess.html
...the state...has not given me anything that it did not first extort from me.
Karl Hess
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Karl_Hess.html
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, criminal, grasping, and unintelligent.
H. L. Mencken
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Mencken.html
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
H. L. Mencken
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Mencken.html
Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.
Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience
...no nation ever lost its liberty, but by the force of foreign invaders, or the domestic treachery of its own magistrates...
Cato's Letters
http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Cato.html
If slavery were the real issue, then slavery among flesh-and-blood human beings alive today would arouse far more outcry than past slavery among people who are long dead. The difference is that past slavery can be cashed in for political benefits today.
Thomas Sowell
Those who trade essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.
Thomas Jefferson
Letter to Wilson Cary Nicholas, Sept. 7, 1803
While mere politicians, in their narrow minds, are sweating and fuming with their complicated statutes, this one single rule, rationally construed and applied, is enough to form the starting point of all that is necessary in government: to make no more laws than those useful for preventing a man or body of men from infringing on the rights of other men.
Walt Whitman
Whitman's "Duties of Government:" http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Whitman.html
Man will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot
A FARK.com post
Cultures are not museum pieces. They are the working machinery of everyday life. Unlike objects of aesthetic contemplation, working machinery is judged by how well it works, compared to the alternatives.
Thomas Sowell
'Conquests & Cultures'
...the socialist idea is nothing but a grandiose rationalization of petty resentments
Ludwig von Mises
Socialism
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