"Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long." – Congressman Ron Paul, August 9, 2004
"The monastic communities for survival will be located in high places, because in dangerous times it is heights that are easiest to defend. They enable the advance of hostile hordes to be seen from a distance and prepared for; and they favor the traditional counter- attacks that are helped by force of gravity — the rolling down of rocks and stones against assailants. Further, hilltops are naturally protected against floods; they are also very likely to be left alone by the large masses of people on the move, since migrant hordes are inclined to go after easy prey rather than …
“The new Hillary Rodham Clinton, coldly calculated to appear warm and spontaneous.”- Rourke
"To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow… For society does not control crime, ever, by forcing the law-abiding to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of criminals. Society controls crime by forcing the criminals to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of the law-abiding." – Jeff Snyder
"A man is finished when he makes pleasure, not duty, his main object," – Cicero
"Most people would rather die than think. In fact, they do." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. He is my ally of the moment and I should presume nothing more.” – Rourke
"Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being." – Lord Acton [John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton] (1834-1902), First Baron Acton of Aldenham
"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But …
"People commit crimes because they are people—because they are innately selfish and do not care how their behavior affects other people, unless they have been raised to behave otherwise or unless they fear the criminal justice system." – Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays, p. 21
"It is an uphill struggle, but I wish that we could distinguish more carefully between freedom and liberty. These conditions are not the same, though they are certainly related. Freedom is the absence of restraint – a physical circumstance. Liberty, on the other hand, is a political situation denoting the lawful capability of the citizen to defend himself and his near and dear without interference from the state. Note that the Declaration of Independence forcibly and particularly establishes the blessings of liberty upon ourselves and our posterity. I like to carry a pocket copy of the Declaration, plus the Constitution, …
"Politicians cannot be trusted with a monopoly of power over other people’s lives. Thousands of years of history have demonstrated this again and again and yet again." – Thomas Sowell, Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays, p. 12
"Even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked." – Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
"It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error." – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson
"There is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe