Liberty

Paul Craig Roberts, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution:

"Over the past three decades, our Founding Fathers have fallen on rough times. Disparaged by liberals and slandered by post-modernists and cultural Marxists, their portraits have been removed from public buildings and their presence stricken from textbooks. It is possible today for American students to pass through elementary school and high school, and obtain a university degree, without gaining any appreciation for the men who founded their country. The horrendous events of Sept. 11 taught Americans that denunciations of their heritage have consequences that go beyond the babbling of crackpot academics and minority 'leaders.' Patriotism and our flag made a comeback."

Supreme Court Justice Brandeis:

"Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purpose is beneficent.  Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.  The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

Roger Wilkins, Civil Rights Author and Historian, on Thomas Jefferson:

"He was a dizzying mixture of searing brilliance and infuriating self-indulgence, of idealism and base racism, of soaring patriotism and myopic self-involvement. He was America writ small."

George Will, Columnist, on Higher Tariffs for Steel Imports:

"Bush’s steel policy is what results when intelligent people take up intellectual slumming — abandoning of proven free-trade principles — for the pleasure of political opportunism."

Pop-Diva Cher:

"What are we going to do next? Put shorts on the statue of David, put an 1880’s bathing suit on the Venus de Milo? If they start doing that, maybe they’ll start deciding what books are all right for us to read, and we’ll start losing all of our freedoms… I didn’t know art was politically correct."

Bob Levy, Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute:

"Restoring the Framers’ notion of enumerated, delegated and thus limited powers will get the state out of our lives and out of our wallets."

David McCullough, Author of "John Adams":

"…[M]ore and more we need understanding and appreciation of those principles upon which the republic was founded. What were those ‘self-evident’ truths that so many risked all for, fought for, suffered and died for? What was the source of their courage? Who were those people? I don’t think we can ever know enough about them."

President George W. Bush in his nationally broadcast speech to China:

"Life in America shows that liberty, paired with law, is not to be feared. In a free society, diversity is not disorder. Debate is not strife. And dissent is not revolution. A free society trusts its citizens to seek greatness in themselves and their country."

Representative Ron Paul (R — Texas):

"Let us be convinced that there is not enough hate or anger to silence the cries for liberty or to extinguish the flame of justice and truth. We must have faith that those who now are apathetic, anxious for security at all costs, forgetful of the true spirit of American liberty, and neglectful of the Constitution, will rise to the task and respond accordingly."

Former President of the United States Ronald Reagan:

"We had strayed a great distance from our Founding Fathers’ vision of America. They regarded the central government’s responsibility as that of providing national security, protecting our democratic freedoms, and limiting the government’s intrusion in our lives — in sum, the protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Tom DeWeese, President, American Policy Center:

"The sole purpose of our Constitution is to define the limited role of government in order to guarantee individual rights."

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"All honor to Jefferson — to the man who… had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all the coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."

Theodore Roosevelt, Former U.S. President:

"Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere." 

Lynne Cheney, director of the Reader's Digest Association and American Express Funds:

"We haven't done a very good job in teaching our history. We haven't [given our students] the knowledge they need to appreciate how greatly fortunate we are for our freedom… Freedom, as a study of our history shows, is not our inevitable heritage. This realization can make our freedom all the more precious. Were we to lose it, liberty might not come our way again."

George W. Bush, President of the United States, speaking to the Conference of Mayors:

"It's a privilege for me to be with the country's most accountable elected officials. ... We always used to say, you know, the government that's closest to the people is that which governs best. You're what I call practical. The farther you get away from the local governments, we get a little theoretical."

Michael DePrimo of the American Family Association Center for Law & Policy:

"If schools spent more time on education and less time on indoctrination the world would be a better place."

Alberto Gonzales, counsel to the President of the United States:

"In the past, senators of both parties have accused each other of illegitimate delays in voting on nominees. The past mistreatment of nominees does not justify today’s behavior. Finger-pointing does nothing to put judges on the bench and ease the courts’ burdens; it only distracts the Senate from its constitutional obligation to act on the president’s judicial nominees."

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