Famous Quotes & Sayings

Calvin Coolidge

It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.

Thomas Reed

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.

Ringo Starr

Everything government touches turns to crap.

Tom Clancy

What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else.

Tom Robbins

When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.

Abraham Lincoln

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.

Alexis de Tocqueville

It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights - the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery - hay and a barn for human cattle.

Felix Frankfurter

The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.

Harry Browne

You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants.

Earl Warren

Citizenship is the right to have rights.

Earl Warren

It is doubtful that congress would pass the Bill of Rights if it were introduced today.

David Ricardo

The last point for consideration is the supposed disposition of the people to interfere with the rights of property. So essential does it appear to me, to the cause of good government, that the rights of property should be held sacred, that I would agree to deprive those of the elective franchise against whom it could justly be alleged that they considered it their interest to invade them.

David Henry Hwang

. . . I felt I was finally in a position to affect not only the artistic content of the American theatre, but also its institutional structures. This has been an important goal of mine, as there have always been a variety of issues - artistic freedom, author's rights, access by minority groups - which have concerned me and even influenced my decision to become a playwright in the first place.

Antonio Tabucchi

I don't have any doubts either about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Perhaps some more should be added to the list, but I don't have the slightest doubt about human rights.

David Price

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.

Frederic Bastiat

Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?

Madeleine Albright

Our strategic dialogue with China can both protect American interests and uphold our principles, provided we are honest about our differences on human rights and other issues and provided we use a mix of targeted incentives and sanctions to narrow these differences.

Carlos Fuentes

What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Any nation which for an extended period puts pleasure before liberty is likely to lose the liberty it misused.

Earl Warren

Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.

Earl Warren

Life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.

David Hume

But to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science...

David Hume

A Tory..., since the revolution, may be defined in a few words, to be a lover of monarchy, though without abandoning liberty; anda partizan of the family of Stuart. As a Whig may be defined to be a lover of liberty though without renouncing monarchy; and a friend to the settlement in the protestant line.

David Hume

Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once.

Arthur Schnitzler

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Frederic Bastiat

Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the tendencies of organizers are always good?

Frederic Bastiat

The plans differ; the planners are all alike...