• A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. -- Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States
  
• Now, hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste, but they detest at leisure. ~ Lord Byron

• Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience. ~ John Locke

• It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. --Samuel Adams

• Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent....The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. -- Justice Brandeis in Olmstead v. U.S., 277 US 438, 479 (1927)
  
• Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined. -- Patrick Henry - in the Virginia ratifying convention
  
• Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded. Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave. -- Dr. Lyle Rossiter
  
• Let us hope our weapons are never needed -- but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government -- and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws. -- Edward Abbey, "Abbey's Road", 1979