Quotes on Limited Freedom

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.

And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would 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.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.