More Quotes;
Sic Semper Tyrannis
(Thus ever to tyrants)
The motto of the original state of Virginia Seal, (Which shows Virtue, sword in hand, with her foot on the prostrate form of Tyranny, whose crown lays nearby). Designed by George Wythe - signed the Declaration of Independence and taught the Law to Thomas Jefferson.
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"No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved in its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defence of the state. . . . Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen."
- "MT. Cicero", Sept. 8, 1788, State Gazette of South Carolina (Charleston).
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"It was absolutely necessary to carry arms for fear of pirates, & c. and ... their arms were all stamped with peace, that they were never to be used but in case of hostile attack, that it was in the law of nature to every man to defend himself, and unlawful for any man to deprive him of those weapons of self defence."
- "Ship News", Independent Chronicle (Boston), Oct. 25, 1787, [in 13 Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution 523 (1981).]
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"In its principles, it is surely democratical; for, however wide and various the firearms of power may appear, they may all be traced to one source, the people."
- James Wilson, Id. at 336. (Signed the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, Congressman, Delegate to the Constitutional Convention and U.S. Supreme Court Justice).
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"Dear Sir, New York Septr. 29. 1787. According to your request I now enclose you the Amendments that I proposed to the new Constitution. I incline to think that unless some such alterations & provisions as these are interposed for the security of those essential rights of Mankind without which liberty cannot exist, we shall soon find that the New plan of Government will be far more inconvenient than anything sustained under the present Government. And that to avoid Scilla we shall have fallen upon Caribdis." I am yours sincerely,
- Richard Henry Lee, letter To Elbridge Gerry
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"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States, Volume 2, Narrative of Negotiations in London, Feb. 1775.
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"For too long, most members of the legal academy have treated the Second Amendment as the equivalent of an embarassing relative, whose mention brings a quick change of subject to other, more respectable, family members. That will no longer do. It is time for the Second Amendment to enter full scale into the consciousness of the legal academy."
- Sanford Levinson, McCormick Professor of Law, University of Texas, The Embarassing Second Amendment, 99 Yale L.J. 637 (1989).
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"A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless."
- Justice Antonin Scalia
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"The Spartan state was a composite body in which kings, nobles, citizens, perioeci, artisans, slaves, had to find a ‘modus vivendi’ with one another. All of them were taught some use of arms."
- Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, Vol. 5, (Laws, Index to the Writings of Plato, Introduction and Analysis), translated into English with Analyses and Introductions by B. Jowett, M.A. in Five Volumes. 3rd edition revised and corrected (Oxford University Press, 1892).
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"Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others."
- William Allen White
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."
- John Milton
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"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible."
- Hubert H. Humphrey
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"Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established."
- Thomas Jefferson, (Letter to James Monroe, 1791).
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"Any government that would attempt to disarm its people is despotic; and any people that would submit to it deserve to be slaves!"
- Stephen F. Austin, 1835.
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“There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights.”
- Smedley Butler
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"We did not speculate as to the intent of the framers of the second amendment; we examined James Madison's drafts for it, his handwritten outlines of speeches upon the Bill of Rights, and discussions of the second amendment by early scholars who were personal friends of Madison, Jefferson, and Washington while these still lived. What the Subcommittee on the Constitution uncovered was clear — and long lost — proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.
- Orrin G. Hatch, Chairman of The 1982 United States Senate subcommittee on the Constitution report.
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"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
"Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?"
"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people."
"The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms."
"The right to revolt has sources deep in our history."
"We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."
- William O. Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Holds the record for the longest continuous service on the nation's most powerful Court: 36 years.**********
"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion."
- Thomas Jefferson
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"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
- Edward R. Murrow
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"One man with courage makes a majority."
- Andrew Jackson
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"When law and morality contradict each other the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his sense of morality or losing his respect for the law. "
- Frederick Bastiat, (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman, and author.**********
"Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the 1st Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press."
"Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind."
- Hugo Black, U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
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"Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent."
"Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."
"Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
"Those who won our independence... valued liberty as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty."
"To declare that the end justifies the means, to declare that the government may commit crimes, would bring terrible retribution."
- Louis D. Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
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"The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting."
- William J. Brennan, Jr., Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
"Both as an American citizen and as a United States Senator I repudiate this view. I likewise repudiate the approach of those who believe to solve American problems you simply become something other than American. To my mind, the uniqueness of our free institutions, the fact that an American citizen can boast freedoms unknown in any other land, is all the more reason to resist any erosion of our individual rights. When our ancestors forged a land "conceived in liberty", they did so with musket and rifle. When they reacted to attempts to dissolve their free institutions, and established their identity as a free nation, they did so as a nation of armed freemen. When they sought to record forever a guarantee of their rights, they devoted one full amendment out of ten to nothing but the protection of their right to keep and bear arms against governmental interference. Under my chairmanship the Subcommittee on the Constitution will concern itself with a proper recognition of, and respect for, this right most valued by free men."
- Orrin G. Hatch, Chairman Subcommittee on the Constitution January 20, 1982.
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"And if that independence is seriously eroded, it will be hard to protect those things that this country was based upon."
"It's important to every American that the law protect his or her basic liberty."
"You can have many different selection systems, but the bottom line has to be a system that, once the judge takes office that judge will feel that he or she is to decide the case without reference to the popular thing or the popular will of the moment."
- Stephen Breyer, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
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"The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time."
- George Sutherland,Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
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“I will always vote on the side of freedom and our right to keep and bear arms.”
- Mel Martinez
"America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She well knows that by one enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom."
- John Quincy Adams
The Constitution is a written instrument. As such, its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when it was adopted, it means now.
- SOUTH CAROLINA v. US, 199 U.S. 437, 448 (1905)
Judges rule on the basis of law, not public opinion, and they should be totally indifferent to pressures of the times.
We may have lured judges into roaming at large in the constitutional field.
- Warren E. Burger,
Chief Justice of the United States
"The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth." - Thomas Paine
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
- C. S. LEWIS
As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.
Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.
- Felix Frankfurter,
United States Supreme Court Associate Justice
Liberty is not a means to a political end. It is itself the highest political end.
- Lord Acton
Law not served by power is an illusion; but power not ruled by law is a menace which our nuclear age cannot afford.
The basic guarantees of our Constitution are warrants for the here and now, and unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason, they are to be promptly fulfilled.
The concept of neutrality can lead to a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it.
- Arthur J. Goldberg, Judge
"The Constitution is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law; if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.
"Thus, the Constitution is either The Supreme Law of the Land, superceding all other laws, or the Constitution is a worthless piece of paper. If the latter, government can do as it pleases. If the former, tyrants have seized sovereignty illegally, it is the duty of the people to put them in their proper place in history."
- John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 1803
No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.
Those who own the country ought to govern it.
- John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States
Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.
-Thurgood Marshall, justice of the United States Supreme Court
Also, in a deeper sense, the Ten Commandments are the basis of our freedom of conscience, which flows from the first table of the law.
And government's only role is to secure our rights for us.
And indeed, it is the right of the states to acknowledge God, as it is the right of the federal government to acknowledge its source of power.
And that's not only true with this judge, but also with many of the federal courts across our land who seem to think, erroneously, that the acknowledgement of God is synonymous with religion.
Anytime you deny the acknowledgement of God you are undermining the entire basis for which our country exists.
Because, if there is no God, then man's power is the controlling aspect, and therefore power will be centralized.
But separation of church and state was never meant to separate God and government.
But today, government is taking those rights from us, pretending that it gives us our rights. Indeed, those rights come from God, and it was recognized throughout our history as such.
I would say that there's not much difference these days between those who run under one party or another because they're all after seeking power.
If God gives you rights, no man and no government can take them away from you.
It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government.
It is altogether proper for people to recognize a sovereign God.
It would bother me if a judge told me how I had to believe.
No, because this country was not founded upon the Qur'an. It was not founded upon a Muslim faith. It was founded upon a Christian faith and the acknowledgement of God of the holy scriptures.
Rights come from God, not from government.
The acknowledgement of God was the very reason for the existence of this country.
The basic premise of the Constitution was a separation of powers and a system of checks and balances because man was perceived as a fallen creature and would always yearn for more power.
The Commandments were placed in the court to acknowledge the moral foundation of our law and the foundation of our government.
The whole basis of the Constitution was a restriction of power, and the whole basis of the federalist system was that there was not one sovereign centralized power from which all authority flows.
They don't want to be reminded that there is an authority higher than the authority of the state.
To do my duty, I must obey God.
To fail to recognize who that God is is not only illogical and ridiculous, it is also detrimental to the court system.
We are asserting exactly the opposite, that the state must acknowledge God and that our freedoms flow from that God, the Judeo-Christian God.
- Roy Moore, Judge
It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.
Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.
- Sandra Day O'Connor, Associate Justice United States Supreme Court
It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
- Robert H. Jackson, Justice
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master".
- George Washington
The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.
In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property.
Potter Stewart, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must, in practice, be a bad government.
And it is no less true, that personal security and private property rest entirely upon the wisdom, the stability, and the integrity of the courts of justice.
- Joseph Story, Judge
The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.
- John F. Kennedy
In reference to the Second Amendment....
"It insures that the people are the equal of their government
whenever that government forgets that it is servant and not master of the
governed. When the British forgot that they got a revolution. And, as a
result, we Americans got a Constitution; a Constitution that,
as those who wrote it were determined, would keep men free."
-Ronald Reagan
No law ever written has stopped any robber, rapist or killer, like cold blue steel in the hands of their last intended victim.
- W. Emerson Wright
"Happy, thrice happy shall they be pronounced hereafter, who have contributed any thing, who have performed the meanest office in erecting this stupendous fabrick of Freedom and Empire on the broad basis of Independency; who have assisted in protecting the rights of humane nature and establishing an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions."
- George Washington
(General Orders, 18 April 1783)
Washington's Maxims, 51
The equation really is quite simple...2nd Amendment + Guns = Freedom
Perverted 2nd Amendment = No Guns = Slavery
DO THE MATH!
(Seems our Founders were far better mathematicians than the politicians we have today!)
- EDQ
"The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."
"It is possible to hold a faith with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar."
"The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion - except for the sect that can win political power."
- From the dissent in Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952).
"Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."
"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."
- Opinion for the Court in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette 319 U.S. 624 (1943).
"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."
- Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Assoc. Justice.
Potestas stricte interpretatur
(A power is strictly interpreted)
In dubiis, non praesumitur pro potentia
(In cases of doubt, the presumption is not in favor of a power)
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