QUOTES OF THE DAY 2-29-12

Everything we have done in response to the 9-11 attacks, from the Patriot Act to the war in Iraq, has reduced freedom in America. Ron Paul

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in. H. L. Mencken

[The Fall of Rome] . . the rising costs of armies, doles, public works, an expanding bureaucracy, and a parasitic court; the depreciation of the currency; the discouragement of ability and the absorption of investment capital by confiscatory taxation, the strait jacket of serfdom placed upon agriculture, and of caste forced upon industry: all these conspired to sap the material bases of Italian life, until at last the power of Rome was a political ghost surviving its economic death. Will Durant

When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen’s constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all. Justice William O. Douglas

Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin. Henry Cabot Lodge

The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf. Will Rogers

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labor of his body and the work of his hands are properly his. John Locke

The founders were not democrats; they foresaw today’s pillage politics – and they understood that, unchecked, overbearing majorities would be more malignant than monarchs. All too well did the founders know that, granted a vote, the unpropertied masses would help themselves to the belongings of the propertied. Ilana Mercer

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. Ernest Hemingway

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm. Friedrich Hayek