Self-government Quotes - Page 3

• At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

  John Paul Stevens

  Government, Self, People

  "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310". United States Supreme Court case No. 08-205, caselaw.findlaw.com. January 21, 2010.

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• The basis of self-government and freedom requires the development of character and self-restraint and perseverance and the long view. And these are qualities which require many years of training and education.

  John F. Kennedy

  Perseverance, Freedom, Character

  Address at the University of Washington's 100th Anniversary Program, November 16, 1961.

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• Self-government requires qualities of self-denial and restraint.

  John F. Kennedy

  Government, Self, Democracy

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• The present generation has the same right of self-government which the past one has exercised for itself.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Past, Government, Self

  Thomas Jefferson, Jerry Holmes (2002). “Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts”, p.298, Rowman & Littlefield

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• We can't have self-government without the self-confidence that is at the root of it.

  Anita Roddick

  Self Confidence, Government, Roots

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• The emblem of equal rights. It means free hands, free lips, self- government, and the sovereignty of the individual.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Mean, Rights, Government

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.3250, Library of Alexandria

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• Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Men, Self, Practice

  Franklin D. Roosevelt (1995). “The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt”, Gramercy

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• Politics is the practical exercise of the art of self-government, and somebody must attend to it if we are to have self-government; somebody must study it, and learn the art, and exercise patience and sympathy and skill to bring the multitude of opinions and wishes of self-governing people into such order that some prevailing opinion may be expressed and peaceably accepted. Otherwise, confusion will result either in dictatorship or anarchy. The principal ground of reproach against any American citizen should be that he is not a politician. Everyone ought to be, as Lincoln was.

  Elihu Root

  Art, Exercise, Self

  "Men and Policies: Addresses". Book by Elihu Root, ed. Robert Bacon and James B. Scott, p. 75, "Lincoln as a Leader of Men", 1924.

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• To rail and rant against tyranny is to manifest inferiority, for there is no tyranny but ignorance; to be conscious of one's powers is to lose consciousness of tyranny. Self government is not a remote aim. It is an intimate and inescapable fact. To govern oneself is a natural imperative, and all tyranny is the miscarriage of self government. The first requisite of freedom is to accept responsibility for the lack of it.

  E.C. Riegel

  Ignorance, Miscarriage, Responsibility

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• There are always those who are willing to surrender local self-government and turn over their affairs to some national authority in exchange for a payment of money out of the Federal Treasury. Whenever they find some abuse needs correction in their neighborhood, instead of applying the remedy themselves they seek to have a tribunal sent on from Washington to discharge their duties for them, regardless of the fact that in accepting such supervision they are bartering away their freedom.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Freedom, Self, Government

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• I have very little experience of self-government. In fact, I am one of the most governed people in the world.

  Prince Philip

  Government, Self, People

  Quoted in N.Y. Times, 30 Dec. 1959

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• Self government is no less essential to the development, growth, and happiness of the individual than to the nation.

  William H. Douglas

  Government, Self, Growth

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• Self-government can succeed only through an instructed electorate.

  Herbert Hoover

  Government, Self, Succeed

  Herbert Hoover (1934). “The State Papers and Other Public Writings of Herbert Hoover”

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• We act not for ourselves but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self - government.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, Race, Self

  Thomas Jefferson (1900). “The Life and Writings of ...”

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• The basis for building a Christian society is evangelism and missions that lead to a widespread Christian revival, so that the great mass of earth's inhabitants will place themselves under Christ's protection, and then voluntarily use his covenantal laws for self-government. Christian reconstruction begins with personal conversion to Christ and self-government under God's law; then it spreads to others through revival; and only later does it bring comprehensive changes in civil law, when the vast majority of voters voluntarily agree to live under biblical blueprints.

  Gary North

  Christian, Biblical, Self

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• A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.

  Cass Sunstein

  Communication, Government, Self

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• For better or worse, man is the tool-using animal, and as such he has become the lord of creation. When he is lord also of himself, he will deserve his self-chosen title homo sapiens.

  William Ralph Inge

  Animal, Men, Self

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• 

  The war...must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks...unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence,and that, or extermination, we WILL have.

  Jefferson Davis

  War, Fall, Fighting

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• God has endowed man with inalienable rights, among which are self-government, reason, and conscience. Man is properly self-governed only when he is guided rightly and governed by his Maker, divine Truth and Love.

  John Dryden

  Men, Rights, Self

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• We insist on producing a farm surplus, but think the government should find a profitable market for it. We overindulge in speculation, but ask the government to prevent panics. Now the only way to hold the government entirely responsible for conditions is to give up our liberty for a dictatorship. If we continue the more reasonable practice of managing our own affairs we must bear the burdens of our own mistakes. A free people cannot shift their responsibility for them to the government. Self-government means self-reliance.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Giving Up, Mistake, Responsibility

  Calvin Coolidge (1972). “Calvin Coolidge says: dispatches written by former-president Coolidge and syndicated to newspapers in 1930-1931 : gathered for issuance in book form on the one-hundredth anniversary of Mr. Coolidge's birth, 4 July 1972”

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• The free-trade idea, logically applied, will abolish usury; and with usury will disappear the chief bone of contention between labor and capital. But, just at this point, free-traders go over to the enemy; and many writers on political economy, in flat contradiction of the essential principles of that science, have made elaborate arguments to prove self-government in finance, impossible! What shall we think of men who, having dethroned kings, demolished popes, destroyed slave oligarchies and assailed tariff monopoly, advise submission to the most oppressive and dishonest of despotisms, Usury?

  Ezra Heywood

  Kings, Men, Thinking

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• Never will we be able to understand our times if we naively 'think' of this system of self Government as the work of a few gangsters or the creation of a pack of criminals we call a political party. The appeal of Socialism, Fascism and communism was principally negative; they were protests against a live and let live anything goes liberalism, a spineless indifference to causes, a failure to recognize that nothing was evil enough to hate, and nothing was good enough to die for.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Hate, Party, Thinking

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• Tax time approaches, and Americans are as always paying H & R Block billions to help them save some of their wealth from their ravenous government. Pitiful, in a way: it underlines the grim but
  unacknowledged fact that the government is their enemy and they have to hire protection from it. But don't we enjoy 'self-government'? Well, if we have it, I'd hardly say we enjoy it. True, we aren't being taxed by the monarch of Great Britain, but our American-born rulers claim far more of our wealth than the British monarchs ever did.

  Joseph Sobran

  Block, Government, Self

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• They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Taken, Self, Law

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Ida Husted Harper, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1902). “History of Woman Suffrage ...: 1883-1900”

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• If the layman cannot participate in decision making, he will have to turn himself over, essentially blind, to a hermetic elite. ... [The fundamental question becomes] are we still capable of self-government and therefore freedom? Margaret Mead wrote in a 1959 issue of Daedalus about scientists elevated to the status of priests. Now there is a name for this elevation, when you are in the hands of-one hopes-a benevolent elite, when you have no control over your political decisions. From the point of view of John Locke, the name for this is slavery.

  Gerald Holton

  Freedom, Self, Views

  "Where is Science Taking Us? Gerald Holton Maps the Possible Routes". The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 18, 1981.

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