Quotes on Limiting Freedom

When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly...When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.

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.

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.

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.

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.

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 only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

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.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.