You can only be free if I am free.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.
Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.
When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.
We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy. One's right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly may not be submitted to vote; they depend on no elections.
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans.
When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!
Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.
Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.
Time is the only thing you can't buy.
The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves.
With respect to the words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.
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