Mamacita says:  Today’s quotations come to us from my friend NYC Educator.

Do you see a theme?  It’s all in your head!  There is no theme!  No theme!  Or, maybe there is.  Coincidences occur all the time.

1. America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. – James Bovard
2. War is just one more big government program. – Joseph Sobran
3. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. – John Adams (1814)
4. They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin
5. One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. – Thomas B. Reed (1886)
6. If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all. – Jacob Hornberger (1995)
7. Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. – P.J. O’Rourke
8. The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates. – Tacitus
9. Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. – George Washington
10. No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. – Mark Twain (1866)
11. There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him. – Robert Heinlein
12. The true danger is when Liberty is nibbled away, for expedients. – Edmund Burke (1899)
13. Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none. – Thomas Jefferson
14. The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society. – Mark Skousen
15. A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. – Thomas Jefferson (1801)
16. The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. – John Hay (1872)
17. Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. – James Bovard (1994)
18. The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. – Thomas Jefferson
19. Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty. – Thomas Jefferson
20. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. – Goethe
21. When the government’s boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence. – Gary Lloyd
22. Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. – H.L. Mencken
23. The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. – H.L. Mencken
24. It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve. – Henry George
25. Where morality is present, laws are unnecessary. Without morality, laws are unenforceable. – Anonymous
26. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. – Barry Goldwater (1964)
27. Liberty is not a means to a political end. It is itself the highest political end. – Lord Acton
28. The power to tax is the power to destroy. – John Marshall
29. [On ancient Athens]: In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. – Edward Gibbon
30. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis
31. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. – Lysander Spooner
32. In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, and cruelty. – Leo Tolstoy
33. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws. – Ayn Rand
34. If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. – Samuel Adams
35. If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. – Somerset Maugham
36. A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. – Alexander Tytler
37. A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. – G. Gordon Liddy
38. The United States is a nation of laws, badly written and randomly enforced. – Frank Zappa
39. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. – Justice Learned Hand
40. It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence. – Charles A. Beard
41. A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. – Edward R. Murrow
42. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. – Thomas Jefferson (1781)
43. The desire to rule is the mother of heresies. – St. John Chrysostom
44. Can our form of government, our system of justice, survive if one can be denied a freedom because he might abuse it? – Harlon Carter
45. It is not the responsibility of the government or the legal system to protect a citizen from himself. – Justice Casey Percell
46. No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words “no” and “not” employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights. – Edmund A. Opitz
47. The government was set to protect man from criminals – and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. – Ayn Rand
48. The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. – Mark Twain
49. What this country needs are more unemployed politicians. – Edward Langley

50.  A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul. – George Bernard Shaw