Read the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights
and try to visualize what it must have been like to be free!

"America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law!"
Katherine Lee Bates, America the Beautiful, 1895

"When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."
Thomas Jefferson, 1821

"Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it."
Milton Friedman

"Every word of the Constitution decides a question between power and liberty."
James Madison

"Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction."
Thomas Jefferson

"If in the opinion of the People, the distribution or modification of the Constitutional powers be in any way particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed. The precedent must always greatly overbalance in permanent evil any partial or transient benefit which the use can at any time yield."
George Washington, 1796 Farewell Address

"The Constitution as many of us have understood it, the instrument that has meant so much to us, is gone. The guarantees heretofore supposed to protect against arbitrary action have been swept away. The powers of Congress have been so enlarged that now no man can tell their limitations." 
Mr. Justice James C. McReynolds, 1935, U.S. Supreme Court (1914-1941).
 
"You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves." George Orwell, "1984"

"By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; and quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of totalitarianism. All the names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly as they were. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufactures and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit." Aldous Huxley

Quotations Relevant to Liberty

"No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."
Edmund Burke

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must undergo the fatigue of supporting it!
Thomas Paine

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens at all, you can bet it was planned that way."
Franklin D. Roosevelt

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."
Winston Churchill

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." 
Albert Einstein

"If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn't thinking."
General George C Patton

"The more corrupt the government, the greater the number of laws" 
Tacitus

"I am for government that is rigorously frugal and simple, and not for one that multiplies offices to make partisans, that is to get votes, and by every device increases the public debt under the guise of being a public benefit."
Thomas Jefferson

"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated into the hands of the few and the Republic is destroyed. "
Attributed to Abraham Lincoln, perhaps wrongly, but nonetheless it has come true!

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction -- we didn't pass it on to our children in the blood-stream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it was like in the U.S. when men were free."
Ronald Regan, 1950s when he was still "just" a film star.

"[I swear] I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."
Standard Form 61, Appointment Affidavits, the oath taken by all new Federal employees.

"I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but the people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take power from them, but to inform them by education."
Thomas Jefferson, 1820.

"Confidence in rulers is everywhere the parent of despotism -- free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; ... In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
Thomas Jefferson, 1798.

"Liberty is a rain forest, the welfare state is a zoo. In the rain forest people may be eaten by lions, but in the zoo they are fed to the lions."
Paraphrased from someone.

"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."
James Madison, 1787

"A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. We are no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
President Wilson, 1919 (note the Federal Reserve, Income tax, and direct election of Senators were passed in 1913)

"You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions - or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often that not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew."
Ayn Rand, "Philosophy: Who Needs It," Philosophy: Who Needs It

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity."
Sigmund Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
Thomas Sowell

"I have never understood why it is 'greed' to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money."
Thomas Sowell

"Treason doth never prosper, What's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
John Harrington, poet, about 1600

"Socialist cry 'power to the people'. and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they mean - power over people, power to the State." Margaret Thatcher