“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, — go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!”

—Samuel Adams

[Impeachable conduct is] misconduct by public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.

—Alexander Hamilton

I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. ... You are a den of vipers and thieves.

—Andrew Jackson (1834)

• Our country has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies. The reason: excessive concentration of power and wealth in a few hands. Instead of government of, by, and for the people, we have a government of the Exxons, by the General Motors, and for the DuPonts. Such concentration serves the interests of the few over the many. History has taught us the perils of this degree of concentrated power and wealth. This concentrated power in the service of greed, together with short-term thinking, prevents our country from foreseeing and forestalling looming problems on the horizon.

  —Ralph Nader

• We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity, but as members of Congress, we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

  —Davy Crockett

• Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself. ... [I] hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

  —Ronald Reagan

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.

—Andrew Jackson

• 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

If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to all of us, as did Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere... Now it is time to take longer strides - time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth. ...we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule... Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share...

—John F. Kennedy (25/05/1961)

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.

—Barry Goldwater

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.

—Patrick Henry

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.

—Sam Houston

A leader is someone who helps improve the lives of other people or improve the system they live under.

—Sam Houston

I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. 'Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'

—Susan B. Anthony

One-half of the people of this nation to-day are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one.

—Susan B. Anthony

Without a vision, the people perish.

—Proverbs 29:18