Category: Quote O’ The Day

Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs, and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would.
— JOHN ADAMS

The American Colonies were all democratic governments, where the power is in the hands of the people and where there is not the least difficulty or jealousy about putting arms into the hands of every man in the country.

European countries should not be ignorant of the strength and the force of such a form of government and how strenuously and almost wonderfully people living under one have sometimes exerted themselves in defence of their rights and liberties and how fatally it has ended with many a man and many a state who have entered into quarrels, wars and contests with them. — George Mason

Government should be good for the liberty of the governed, and that is when it governs to the least possible degree. It should be good for the wealth of the nation, and that is when it acts as little as possible upon the labor that produces it and when it consumes as little as possible. It should be good for the public security, and that is when it protects as much as possible, provided that the protection does not cost more than it brings in…. It is in losing their powers of action that governments improve. Each time that the governed gain space there is progress.
-Augustin Theirry

“Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy … censorship.
When any government, or any church, for that matter, undertakes to say to it’s subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives.
Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything.
You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
–Robert A. Heinlein,

Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of freemen. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
– Patrick Henry

Never give up your guns. Any American who demands his countrymen give up theirs is either a criminally negligent incompetent at citizenship, or an evil domestic enemy who knows exactly the kind of tyranny he is salivating to unleash. -David Codrea

The whole of the Bill of Rights is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals. It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.
— Albert Gallatin 1789.

In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all — security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
— Edward Gibbon [On ancient Athens]

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
— Thomas Jefferson

The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them.
— George Will

The Supreme Court weighed in on that many 80 ago:
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette

The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” Thomas Jefferson

ISP (Illinois State Police) Won’t Pursue Charges Against Residents Who Didn’t Register Guns By Jan 1

Springfield, IL-(Effingham Radio)- The Illinois State Police won’t pursue charges against Illinois residents who didn’t register their weapons that fall under the new law by the January 1st deadline.

The ISP says the FOID Portal will remain open and people can submit endorsement affidavits at any time. Residents who fail to register weapons that fall under the law could face felony charges. More than 29-thousand residents have registered their assault weapons.

Sutter County (California) Sheriff and District Attorney”

“…As a Sheriff’s Office, we use discretionary decision making in our investigations and act in accordance with the spirit of the intended law.

As a District Attorney’s Office, we evaluate cases based on the totality of the circumstances and the ability to seek successful prosecution based on the evidence presented to us.

The Sutter County Sheriff’s Office and The Sutter County District Attorney’s Office will work collaboratively to evaluate circumstances on a case-by-case basis and do what is in the best interest of justice and our community.

We have no interest in criminalizing constitutionally protected behavior. We took an oath to uphold our Constitution and will work to protect the rights of our citizens. This issue is far from being resolved and we are hopeful the courts will rule in favor of our constitution. We will continue to keep our community informed on this important issue.”

Tulare County (California) Sheriff  won’t ‘actively’ seek SB 2 violators

As your Sheriff, I want to make it clear that the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office will NOT be out actively looking for Lawful CCW Permit holders who might be violating Senate Bill 2. The Sheriff’s Office has much more pressing issues to tackle and does not have the time, nor the resources, to invest in a law, where the specifics seem to change on a daily basis.

Yuba County (California) Sheriff and District Attorney

We believe that SB 2’s sweeping expansion of “sensitive place” provisions for concealed carry permit holders is repugnant to the United States Constitution and will be struck down by the courts for violating the Second Amendment. Until the legal challenges to SB 2 have been definitively settled by the courts, we will exercise our common sense and discretion to ensure the law is not enforced in a way that would violate the rights of our citizens.

Expecting a carjacker or rapist or drug pusher to care that his possession or use of a gun is unlawful is like expecting a terrorist to care that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces.
– Joseph T. Chew

Government should not be the information police

The late Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson made an astute pronouncement regarding the role of government in managing the citizenry. He wrote, “It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.” This kind of thinking has served the United States well for almost two and a half centuries.

Justice Jackson would have been shocked and saddened to see the results of a recent Pew Research Center poll which assessed public perception of the role of government in controlling false information. The poll reveals that almost half of Americans (48 percent) support the government taking action to restrict false information in the public sphere. Worse yet, those Americans are willing to yield to government information control even “if it means losing some freedom to access and publish content.”

Justice Jackson was a bright and independent thinker in his time. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1942 by President Franklin Roosevelt. He is the last justice to serve on the Supreme Court who did not have a law degree. He was appointed by President Truman to serve as the United States’ chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals — and won praise for his management of such uncharted legal territory. Given his experience prosecuting Nazis, Jackson knew well the dangers of information flow being determined or restricted by dictatorial regimes.

Jackson’s quote about the government playing no role in keeping citizens from error is consistent with the thinking of the nation’s constitutional framers. The nation’s founders particularly feared letting monarchs unilaterally determine what information and ideas were approved for citizen consumption. Thus, the founders created a republic that limited such government authority. Those respondents in the Pew poll who entrust the government to decide what is “false” are abandoning fundamental philosophies on which the First Amendment was created. Nobody should assume the government sufficiently knows what information is, indeed, “false,” or much less, needs to be restricted. Further, the government itself can be and has often been the disseminator of false information.

The First Amendment was put in place with the confidence that free citizens debating robustly could eventually sort out the accurate from the false. Founding father Thomas Jefferson said a free people can “tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” A free press and citizens speaking freely can combat societal misinformation more effectively than politicians or government bureaucrats. The First Amendment was created in the first place precisely to let citizens referee the information landscape and question “information” from the authorities.

Only the most sinister people in a culture support the promulgation of false information, but that’s not the root concern here. The issue is how a society sorts out the false from the sensible and who gets to umpire.

Government leaders, no matter how noble, are still self-interested to a large degree and surely don’t have a corner on common sense or reality. The accuracy or falsehood of information is not always clear cut, as Americans surely know in these confusing times. The picture of reality is quite hazy on national matters today ranging from Afghanistan to COVID protocols to rising crime rates, and so on.

World War II challenged the United States in more severe ways than anything being faced today. As a recent Library of Congress study reported, the Office of War Information at that time became aware of the massive rumors and misinformation floating around the nation. The OWI acknowledged that its own lack of transparency was a cause of speculation and rumors. OWI organizers responded with more robust openness, writing at the time, “Rumors can be converted to positive value if they are studied as a guide to information gaps which need to be filled — not by rumor denials but by intensive information programs.”

Americans of any political leaning should be concerned hearing White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki proudly proclaim the administration’s efforts to “flag” for Facebook any pandemic messages counter to White House approved content, as she did earlier this summer. Worse yet, this effort is conducted in collaboration with social media outlets. Instead of flagging as disinformation material the White House doesn’t like, the administration should simply use its huge megaphone to inject its own perspective into the public dialogue. If that rhetoric is sufficiently convincing, the White House will have nothing to worry about.

Censorship of unwanted content only works when accompanied by the hammer of authoritarianism. Free societies address questionable content with debate and more information, but apparently 48 percent of Americans still need to grasp that notion.