Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.
Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.
Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots.
Good intentions will always be pleaded, for every assumption of power; but they cannot justify it ... It is hardly too strong to say, that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intention, real or pretended.
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.
For an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please.
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
The great object is that every man be armed.
If you can't answer a man's arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.
We are not punished for our sins, but by them.
If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.
The laws of economics tell us that the expansion of the central state can't go on forever. Its limit is reached when the looted turn on the looters.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.
See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.
A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion.
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
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