To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical
— Thomas Jefferson, The Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1779)
…writing in the First Amendment’s sister document, expressing a principle that applies to the modern refusal to provide employees with services they consider immoral
“Oh no, the Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me some silver and I’ll make him spit her out.”
The bullying of fellow citizens by means of dreads and frights has been going on since paleolithic times. Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are not much different than tribal wizards on the subject of lunar eclipses.
“Oh no, the Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin.
Give me some silver and I’ll make him spit her out.”
— P.J.O’Rourke, All the Trouble in the World
It seems to be a persistent failing
that politicians listen to the loudest voices
rather than the wisest ones.
— Dave Nalle, RLC National Chairman
“Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.”
After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.
I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
— William S Burroughs, The War Universe (1992)
“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed”
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.
Then it is important to strengthen the state governments: and as this cannot be done by any change in the federal constitution…it must be done by the states themselves, erecting such barriers at the constitutional line as cannot be surmounted either by themselves or by the general
government.
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Archibald Stuart, on the need to defend States’ Rights against the Federal government
I think we can all agree that this is very important.
We need our highest judicial body to stop this childish bickering and get back to debating the kinds of weighty constitutional issues that have absorbed the court in recent years, such as whether a city can legally force an exotic dancer to cover her entire nipple, or just the part that pokes out.
— Dave Barry, Dave Barry is Not Making This Up
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Isaac McPherson (1813)
But Now You Know
