Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: Don't do to other nations what we don't want happening to us. We endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?
Ron PaulRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Complacency and submission to authority lead to the loss of liberty.
This quote by Ron Paul emphasizes that freedom is compromised when citizens become complacent and accept intrusive measures by the government. It argues that the very foundation of American values was built on dissent and distrust of authority, warning that societies that lack a spirit of protest or critical questioning jeopardize their own freedom.
Themes
LibertyFreedomComplacencyGovernmentProtestSociety
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on civil liberties, one might reference this quote to highlight the dangers of government overreach.
More from Ron Paul
All quotes →No one talks about the real ethics disaster in Washington. It's that many members of Congress will listen to any argument against a bill except for two: that it's not moral or that it's not Constitutional.
Ron PaulRead
If we are not even free anymore to decide something as basic as what we wish to eat or drink, how much freedom do we really have left?
Ron PaulRead
I wish I could say I was shocked at the reports the NSA is secretly spying on the private phone calls of millions of Verizon customers. However, this is a predictable result of a government that continues to erode our liberties while promising some glimmering hope of security.
Ron PaulRead
They ask me if I'm going to quit. I thought we were just getting started. We have a revolution to fight, a country to change.
Ron PaulRead
When one person can initiate war, by its definition, a republic no longer exists.
Ron PaulRead
Similar quotes
We weren't getting a fair deal on the budget and I wasn't going to have it. There's a great strand of equity and fairness in the British people - this is our characteristic. There's not a strand of equity and fairness in Europe - they're out to get as much as they can. That's one of those enormous differences. So I tackled it on that basis.
Margaret ThatcherRead
Nothing can be more evident, than that an exclusive power of regulating elections for the National Government, in the hands of the State Legislatures, would leave the existence of the Union entirely at their mercy . . . . It is to little purpose to say that a neglect or omission of this kind [not letting the feds have elections], would be unlikely to take place. The constitutional possibility of the thing, without an equivalent for the risk, is an unanswerable objection.
Alexander HamiltonRead
The problem with elections is that anybody who wants an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it. And anybody who does not want an office badly enough to run for it probably shouldn’t have it, either. Government office should be received like a child’s Christmas present, with surprise and delight. Instead it is usually received like a diploma, an anticlimax that never seems worth the struggle to earn it.
Orson Scott CardRead
There's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America.
Barack ObamaRead
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
It is time to stop personal destruction and prying into private lives
William J. ClintonRead