Quotes
Quotes about Men
A criminal trial is like a Russian novel: it starts with exasperating slowness as the characters are introduced to a jury, then there are complications in the form of minor witnesses, the protagonist finally appears and contradictions arise to produce drama, and finally as both jury and spectators grow weary and confused the pace quickens, reaching its climax in passionate final argument.
If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.
They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.
It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority.
The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.
All that a good government aims at...is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities.
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life; but only a fool trusts either of them.
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
...Although the political liberty of this country is greater than that of nearly every other civilized nation, its personal liberty is said to be less. In other words, men are thought to be more under the control of extra-legal authorities, and to defer more to those around them, in pursuing even their lawful and innocent occupations, than in almost every other country.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. - "Amendment II".
If you are to stand up for your Government you must be able to stand up to your Government.
We just did a survey that showed.... something like 65 percent of the [American] people couldn't vote for the First Amendment if it was up for a vote today.
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.
A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.
When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.
People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
...economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.
Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'etre to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man's innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.
Government is beating into submission, imprisoning, and killing...The authority of man-made law is entirely due to weapons of the constables who enforce obedience to its provisions.
The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous.
If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature isâand why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.
