"This nation…has no right to expect that it always will have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution…[If] the calamities of war befall us, the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate." – U.S. Supreme Court, Ex Parte Milligan decision, 1866
“Experience should teach us to be on our most guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” – Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
"The groups conserving civilized values and preparing for the renaissance will have to enjoy notable freedom from the immediate anxieties which would otherwise exhaust their energies; and this could happen only by means of an initial endowment made soon enough (that is, before the dark age begins) by the planners of the survival groups. This initial endowment could not be in money, since money would obviously be among the first casualties when the systems break down. Instead, it would have to be an endowment of concrete things; tools, implements, motor-generator sets, non-perishable good which a monastic community would make more …
Josey Wales: “When I get to likin’ someone, they ain’t around long.” Lone Watie: “I notice when you get to dislikin’ someone they ain’t around for long, neither.” – The Outlaw Josey Wales
"To govern according to the sense and agreement of the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of governance. This object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular election, and popular election is a mighty evil." – Edmund Burke
“Great cities, the emblems of Western Civilization, began as a walled defenses against marauding enemies. In a world turned upside-down, they are now our great vulnerability. They are suicidal concentrations of expensive economic, cultural and political assets waiting, exposed, for destruction. The only way to ignore nuclear terrorism will be to “redeploy” preemptively out of the crosshairs. Within years our cities will die – abandoned or incinerated.” – “Flamethrower”, at the FreeRepubliic Forums
"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world." – Thomas Jefferson to A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy, 1820. FE 10:175
“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who survive; the ‘learned’ find themselves fully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.” – Eric Hoffer
"Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book." – Ronald Wilson Reagan
"The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." – George Will
“It is a sad commentary on human affairs, down to our day, that ‘sweet reasonableness’ and sensible quiet argument never get very far as such-that nothing gets done until a sizable bloc of people gets organized and starts raising enough h*ll to persuade those in power that they had better start listening to what is being said.” – George F. Willison “Patrick Henry and His World”
“It is constantly reiterated that education begins in the home, as indeed it does, but what is often forgotten is that morality begins in the home also.” – Louis L’Amour, “Education of a Wandering Man“
"The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected." – Will Rogers
"[T]he value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle which go into the project. Life is enriched by aspiration and effort, rather than by acquisition and accumulation.- Helen and Scott Nearing, Living the Good Life
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." – James Madison, to the Virginia ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788.