Founders' Quotes - Encroachment of Power

The Patriot Post ^ | 01/25/2008 | various

[Loud Mime]

“Would it not be better to simplify the system of taxation rather than to spread it over such a variety of subjects and pass through so many new hands.”
Thomas Jefferson

"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.
George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."
Thomas Jefferson (Summary View of the Rights of British America, August 1774

Others

“No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”
Judge Gideon Tucker

“What is euphemistically called government-corporate ‘partnership’ is just government coercion, political favoritism, collectivist industrial policy, and old-fashioned federal boondoggles nicely wrapped up in a bright-colored ribbon. It doesn’t work.”
Ronald Reagan

“English experience indicates that when two political parties agree about something, it is generally wrong.”
G. K. Chesterton

“What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.”
Aristotle

[Loud Mime]

PING

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Have a great weekend. You fellow Californians keep dry!

[Bigun]

Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind.

James Wilson, Lectures on Law, 179

“Everyone, by his property or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs and a degree of freedom which, in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private.”

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:401

It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government.

Mercy Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, 1805

“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

Frederic Bastiat

And my personal favorite:

"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is force, and like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

George Washington