OK, let's have a "Quotes" thread!

“Government is said to be a necessary evil. The saying appears to be without merit. For can anything be at once necessary and evil? True, all governments have had a history of evil-doing, more or less. However, it does not follow from this experience that their good is indistinguishable from their evil. Governments—assuming a proper limitation of their activities—are necessary and not evil. Their evil begins when they step out of bounds.”—Economist Leonard Read

This is one of my favorites, which states something too often forgotten.

I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

More for what pays the most please!.edu

And here we come to the vital distinction between the advocacy of temperance and the advocacy of prohibition. Temperance and self-control are convertible terms. Prohibition, or that which it implies, is the direct negation of the term self-control. In order to save the small percentage of men who are too weak to resist their animal desires, it aims to put chains on every man, the weak and the strong alike. And if this is proper in one respect, why not in all respects? Yet, what would one think of a proposition to keep all men locked up because a certain number have a propensity to steal?– Percy Andreae, "A Glimpse behind the Mask of Prohibition" [1915]

Only.edu

Or should i say .edWE

"We the people" should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can not be trusted.-Susan Neiman

The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.– Alexis de Tocqueville

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems,” Dr. King said. “I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, ‘What about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”-Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Scripture tells us that in the End Times, that is what [the] Antichrist will be — he will be a part of a one-world system. There are people who reject Judeo-Christian truth and instead want to insert and usurp control of all of our lives with a global, economic and political government.”— Former Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann

I feel this is rather apt considering recent events:

"If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." --Winston Churchill

[screencast]Fj7hHZK46Hg[/screencast]

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lmddgtfy&kae=-1

Liberty has nothing to do with national interests. It is about the individual. It concerns the liberty to live your own life, to pursue your own livelihood, and to come and go as you please to anywhere that’s open to you or anywhere you’re invited to go.– Charles Johnson

"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Originally Posted by Jeebizz "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Wasn't it Voltaire that said that?