Free State Quotes

• If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Education, Freedom, War

  Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, 6 January 1816

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• A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. - Second Amendment to the Constitution An armed society is a polite society.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Gun, Libertarian Party, Assault Weapons

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• Reread that pesky first clause of the Second Amendment. It doesn't say what any of us thought it said. What it says is that infringing the right of the people to keep and bears arms is treason. What else do you call an act that endangers "the security of a free state"? And if it's treason,then it's punishable by death. I suggest due process, speedy trials, and public hangings.

  L. Neil Smith

  Gun, People, Second Amendment

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• A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.

  George Mason

  Army, Gun, People

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• The election of John F Kennedy will lead to the death of a free church and a free state.

  W. A. Criswell

  Scary, Church, Election

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• In a virtuous and free state, no rewards can be so pleasing to sensible minds, as those which include the approbation of our fellow citizens. My great pain is, lest my poor endeavours should fall short of the kind expectations of my country.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Pain, Fall

  Thomas Jefferson, Newsweek, inc. Book Division (1974). “Thomas Jefferson: a biography in his own words”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• In a word, the free Church in a free State has been the programme which led me to my first efforts, and which I continue to regard as just and true, reasonable and practical, after the studies of thirty years.

  Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour

  Years, Effort, Religion

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• Disunion and civil war are at hand; and yet I fear disunion and war less than compromise. We can recover from them. The free States alone, if we must go on alone, will make a glorious nation. Twenty millions in the temperate zone, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, full of vigor, industry, inventive genius, educated, and moral; increasing by immigration rapidly, and, above all, free--all free--will form a confederacy of twenty States scarcely inferior in real power to the unfortunate Union of thirty-three States which we had on the first of November.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Real, War, Hands

  Rutherford B. Hayes (2016). “Conspicuous Gallantry: Civil War Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes (Abridged)”, p.4, BIG BYTE BOOKS

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• To exclude groups of people because of their faith, this isn't worthy of the free state in which we live. It isn't compatible with our essential values. And its humanly reprehensible, xenophobia, racism, extremism have no place here. We are fighting to ensure that they don't have a place elsewhere either.

  Angela Merkel

  Xenophobia, Fighting, Racism

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• Ulysses is the greatest anti-racist text in the English language, and it challenges right from the beginning the vicious racism which lies near the foundations of the Irish Free State and of the Irish republic.

  Tom Paulin

  Lying, Racism, Challenges

  "Not one of us" by Tom Paulin, www.theguardian.com. August 29, 2000.

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• It is a fallacy to believe that a Republic of any kind can be won through the shackled Free State. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The Free State is British created and serves British Imperialist interests. It is the buffer erected between British Capitalism and the Irish Republic.

  Liam Mellows

  Believe, Ears, Republic

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• A free citizen in a free state, it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.

  H. L. Mencken

  Exercise, Men, Play

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• an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness of mankind, and, therefore, every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Rights, Law, Common

  Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Sears Morgan (2006). “Not Your Usual Founding Father: Selected Readings from Benjamin Franklin”, p.257, Yale University Press

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• The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit.

  William H. Seward

  Class, Southern, Slave

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• I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.

  Tony Gilroy

  Writing, Sketching, States

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• Disunion and civil war are at hand; and yet I fear disunion and war less than compromise. We can recover from them. The free States alone, if we must go on alone, will make a glorious nation.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  War, Hands, Goes On

  Rutherford B. Hayes (2016). “Conspicuous Gallantry: Civil War Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes (Abridged)”, p.4, BIG BYTE BOOKS

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• The real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Real, Liberty, Judgment

  "Theological-Political Treatise". Book by Baruch Spinoza, Ch. 20, That In a Free State Every Man May Think What He Likes, and Say What He Thinks, 1670.

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• Baptists have long upheld the ideal of a free church in a free state. And from the beginning, they believed that forcing a person to worship against his will violated the principles of both Christianity and civility.

  George W. Bush

  Long, Church, Atheism

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• The Free State men, myself among them, took it for granted that Missouri was a slave state.

  Buffalo Bill

  Men, Slave, Granted

  Buffalo Bill (1879). “The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, the Famous Hunter, Scout, and Guide: An Autobiography”, p.125, U of Nebraska Press

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• Excessive dealings with tyrants are not good for the security of free states.

  Demosthenes

  Tyrants, States, Dealings

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• The Irish Free State was one of dozens of new European democracies to emerge from the cauldron of the 1914-1918 war. It was one of the very few that was still democratic in 1939. This book shows how the steely determination of one man, Kevin O'Higgins, made this possible. O'Higgins faced down mutinies in both the Gardai and the Army. He dissolved the Dáil Courts which were a parallel system that might easily have undermined the conventional courts. With WT Cosgrave, he put through a constitution which reconciled the local opponents of independence with the new State.

  John Bruton

  Determination, War, Book

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• Close alliances with despots are never safe for free states.

  Demosthenes

  Safety, Alliances, States

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• Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Peace, War, House

  Thomas Jefferson, Brett F. Woods (2009). “Thomas Jefferson: Thoughts on War and Revolution”, p.257, Algora Publishing

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• The commerce of a free people is many times more valuable than that of slaves. Freemen produce and consume vastly more than slaves. They have therefore more to buy and more to sell. Hence the free states have a direct pecuniary interest in the civil freedom of all the other states. Commerce between free and slave states is not reciprocal or equal.

  Lysander Spooner

  People, Slave, States

  Lysander Spooner (1845). “The Unconstitutionality of Slavery”, p.130

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• A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

  James Madison

  Gun, Libertarian Party, Assault Weapons

  James Madison, Gaillard Hunt, James Brown Scott (1999). “The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787: Which Framed the Constitution of the United States of America”, p.690, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

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