Quotes on Freedom, Liberty, and the American Way

"It is not wonderful that a nation of slave-holders, upon achieving independence, failed to abolish slavery. What is wonderful, indeed miraculous, is that a nation of slave-holders founded a new nation on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,’ making the abolition of slavery a moral and political necessity."
Harry V. Jaffa

We're told the First Amendment requires a separation of church and state, which, just as an incidental matter, is completely false. The whole point of the Constitution is to separate the federal government from the individual.
Ann Coulter

The disdain for Washington and the Founding derives from the modern ideology that government exists not to protect our rights but to supply our needs and wants.
Glenn Ellmers

When the American consumers face a problem Democrats cannot stand by and allow capitalism and free enterprise to be the answer. Government must be the answer. Leftists believe America is great because of government, not because of economic freedom and free enterprise.
Neal Boortz

"the natural progress of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield."
Thomas Jefferson

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
-George Bernard Shaw

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"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism...A hyphenated American is not an American at all. Americanism is a matter of the spirit, and of the soul. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans...each preserving its separate nationality. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American." Teddy Roosevelt "Democracy is not some harlot in the street to be picked up by some man with a Tommy gun. Democracy is based on reason, a sense of fair play, and freedom, and a respect for other people."
Winston Churchill

It's not the hard times, but the good ones that drive an empire to ruin. Keith Phipps

ARTHUR M. Schlesinger wrote in "The Disuniting of America": "History is to the nation ... as memory is to the individual. An individual deprived of memory becomes disoriented and lost, not knowing where he has been or where he is going, so a nation denied a conception of its past will be disabled in dealing with its present and future."

Folks in Tonopah and other hamlets from Bangor, Maine, to Gold Beach, Ore., don't expect very much from the federal government -- only that it be respectful of their beliefs. Americans without strong political agendas do not want to be insulted by dishonest rationalizations about tawdry behavior, and they don't want to be tax slaves to the special interests. The Democratic establishment is now firmly associated with both of those non-virtues.
Bill O'Reilly

Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
-- Joseph Stalin .

The Democrat Party is the enemy of freedom and liberty. The Democrat Party is the party of the state – the party of government – the party of class warfare – the party of economic slavery – the party of Statism – the party of socialism. Democrats believe that America is great because of government. They believe that the freedoms we do enjoy are gifts to us from government and can, therefore, be taken away or modified when government feels it in its best interests to do so. Every single person in this country who casts a vote for a Democratic candidate for any public office is a full fledged participant in the destruction of all that our founding fathers stood for and worked to achieve.
Neal Boortz

Leaving space exploration entirely in the hands of a big, unwieldy, 1960s-style federal bureaucracy is the equivalent of giving the 15th-century Vatican a monopoly on ocean-going ships. One day — a thousand or ten thousand years from now — human beings will populate the galaxy, the Milky Way itself. I doubt it will be a government operation. Much more likely it will be messy, noisy, violent, cheesy, and commercial. We'll take all our humanity with us, all our faith and superstition, all our loyalties and rancors, all our wisdom and all our follies, operas and game shows, novels and comic books, poems and porn, all our jostling gregariousness and weeping inner loneliness.
John Derbyshire NRO

Toynbee observed that one of the consistent symptoms of a disintegrating civilization is that elites begin to imitate the bottom of society. Toynbee says the growth phase of civilization is led by a creative minority who have a strong, self-confident sense of style, virtue and purpose. The uncreative majority follows along through attempts to imitate the creative minority.
Walter Williams

"That the two political parties should represent opposed ideals and policies. . . is a foolish idea. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical . . .The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in detail, procedure, priority, or method.
Professor Carroll Quigley. (Clinton Professor)

Few people use the word "bipartisan" with more intensity but with less conviction than House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt.
Jonah Goldberg

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Make no mistake - straight white men are the favorite targets of the "hate America" crowd, and the elitists who control them. Why? I believe the answer is simple -- because they represent truth. They represent a spiritual and historical lineage to the Founders of the Republic, and prior to that, a stable and successful European culture. The hatred liberals have for straight, white males actually has nothing to do with color. After all, most liberals in America are white themselves. It has to do with hating a successful culture, more precisely the Judeo/Christian underpinnings of that culture. And it has everything to do with discrediting the Founders of this nation, who of course were straight white males. In order to tear down the Constitution, you need to discredit the framers of that Constitution, and also discredit those who may wish to protect the framers' work.
Patrick Rooney

In the Leftist view, of course, only Marxist nations such as China and the late Soviet Union are entitled to have empires.
Lowell Ponte

"The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract."
Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Our Constitution is color-blind," and that "the law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved."
Justice John Marshall Harlan in his famous dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson

After the Civil War whites began to say that "something must be done" with the freed blacks. Douglass’ answer was: "Do nothing with them, but leave them like you have left other men, to do with and for themselves." And to those who insisted that blacks required special help, Douglass’ response was: "please mind your own business, and leave us to mind ours. If we cannot stand up, then let us fall down. We ask nothing but simple justice, and an equal chance to live…. Do nothing with us, or by us, as a particular class. We now simply ask to be allowed to do for ourselves."
Glenn Ellmers

As John Ashcroft said a month ago, "As an American who cares about our culture, I want to restrict a mass murderer's access to the public podium. I do not want anyone to be able to purchase access to the podium of America with the blood of 168 innocent victims."
Unfortunately, most of the media sees it differently. Everyone from Gore Vidal, who's covering the execution for Vanity Fair, to each of the networks, believes that if you kill a bunch of people, you automatically become fascinating and your ideas are noteworthy. Vidal told ABC news recently, "I became fascinated by [McVeigh]. First of all he's a very good, clear writer and he knows a lot about the Constitution and is very interested in the Bill of Rights."
Gosh, what a shame he had to kill all of those people to get noticed.
Jonah Goldberg

Many foreign nations and peoples hate Americans for the very reasons most Americans loathe me. Think about that.
Timothy McVeigh

Let us be clear: McVeigh was a low-down murderer who struck at the heart of the republic. He was not a patriot in any sense of the word. What he did was not a political act. It was a crime. He did not make arguments to reform the government. He made bombs to destroy it.
Claremont Institute

I know there are people in the American Bar Association who think it's wonderful when guilty people are freed by "good" lawyering, but let's not pretend that "good lawyering" and justice are necessarily synonymous.
Jonah Goldberg

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facts are stubborn things
John Adams

Pearl Harbor, the history, teaches us not to fear the burdens of freedom. "Pearl Harbor," the film, would teach us that our diversity is a strength. Not quite so. Diversity is a challenge. Our strength lies, rather, in our common love of freedom and the insistence that everybody have it. But freedom also imposes conditions, often harsh, on those who would cherish it. That duty is what civilized nations forget and their statesmen are continually obliged to etch into the national memory.
Ken Masugi is Director of the Center for Local Government, at the Claremont Institute

Civilian disarmament is not only harmful to one's freedom but also counterproductive in achieving safety.
That has been further attested by University of Hawaii Professor R. J. Rummel's ``Death by Government'' (1994) and Stephane Courtois' edited volume, ``The Black Book of Communism'' (1999). These books make it clear that authoritarianism and totalitarianism are dangerous to the health of humanity. During the 20th century, more than 100 million people were killed by their own governments bent on destroying liberty and building socialism and collectivism.
I personally can testify that when Cubans lost their guns in 1959, they also lost their ability to regain freedom. Thus today, Cubans on the other side of the Florida Strait remain enslaved in what was supposed to have been the dream of a socialist utopia, the ultimate Caribbean Worker's Paradise. What they ended up with was the nightmare of a police state in a communist island prison.
Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D.

We are no longer a nation "of the people, for the people, and by the people," but one for the politicians, of the special interests, and by the will of the federal judiciary.
Jon Dougherty

"With the collapse of Marxism, environmentalism has become the new refuge of socialist thinking. The environment is a great way to advance a political agenda that favors central planning and an intrusive government. What better way to control someone's property than to subordinate one's private property rights to environmental concerns."
Rush Limbaugh

According to Gramsci, "hegemony" is political power that flows from intellectual and moral leadership, authority or consensus as distinguished from armed force. A ruling class forms and maintains a regime, sustains its hegemony in civil society by creating cultural and political consensus through schools, the church, the media, unions, political parties, and other voluntary associations. Gramsci saw that the hegemony of the private-property culture had to be undermined before socialism could succeed in the West.
Malcolm Wallop & L. Francis Bouchey

We just seek that elusive balance that our forefathers sought -- a government strong enough to do its limited tasks but not strong enough to usurp the people's rights.
The traditional American belief, both among our Revolutionary forefathers and Confederate forefathers, was this formula: Sovereignty rests with the people; people control the Constitution; and the Constitution controls the government.
Today, of course, the Constitution is generally disregarded and the government presumes to control the people. Nor do most Americans recognize that tyranny always wears a smiling face. Let me solve your problems, says the would-be tyrant. You don't have a job? I'll provide you with one. You didn't save for your old age? I'll give you a pension. What? You didn't take care of yourself or put aside a little something for the doctor? Not to worry; I'll provide you with medical care.
Soon people who think they are accepting "free benefits" find out they have traded away their freedom. Today working men and women pay nearly half their income in taxes and lose another chunk to that most insidious of all taxes, inflation. The Founding Fathers would not recognize the country.
- Charley Reese - Orlando Sentinel Sun

"I'm a voter. Aren't you supposed to lie to me and kiss my butt?
Bill Murray, GhostBusters II to mayor (as Dr. Peter Venkman)

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"In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants --everywhere in the world.

"The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor --anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt January 6, 1941