Patriots Post 01-17-13

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” –Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1795

Patriots Post 01-16-13

“Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.” –Alexander Hamilton

Patriots Post 01-16-13

“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” –James Madison, letter to Edmund Pendleton, 1792

Patriots Post 01-15-13

“No free government was ever founded or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defence of the state…. Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.” –Josiah Quincy, Jr., Thoughts on Standing Armies, 1774

Patriots Post 01-13-13

“One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.” –Thomas Jefferson

Patriots Post 01-13-13

“A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves … and include… all men capable of bearing arms. … The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle.” —                  Richard Lee, Federal Farmer LIII

Patriots Post 01-11-13

“I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.” –George Mason, Speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788

Patriots Post 01-10-13

“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow.” –James Madison, Federalist No. 62, 1788

Patriots Post 01-09-13

“O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone; and you have no longer an aristocratical, no longer a democratical spirit. Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation, brought about by the punishment of those in power, inflicted by those who had no power at all?” –Patrick Henry, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788

Patriots Post 01-08-13

“[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, – who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia.” –George Mason, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788