“Our government has the weirdest bias against cannabis. There's no reason for everybody to be so afraid of it. It's not the antichrist the DEA makes it out to be. Industrial hemp is a very useful plant. I challenged the attorney general to get rid of the criminal stigma associated with hemp so we can look at it in terms of how it might be useful. And government has no business telling us what we can and can't use for pain relief.”

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 10 (p. 190)

Source: Give Me Liberty (1936), p. 47

Source: Jennifer Government (2003), Chapter 53, page 202

Essay as "Mr. X" (1969)
Context: I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word "crazy" to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: "did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy."

2013, Brandenburg Gate Speech (June 2013)

Speech at Harvard Law School (16 February 1999) http://www.nra.org/Speech.aspx?id=6029
Context: Telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can't be far behind.
Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America's campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who're supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression?
Let's be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe?
It scares me to death and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason.
You are the best and the brightest. You, here in the fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that... and abide it... you are — by your grandfathers' standards — cowards.

"Learning and Science", speech at a dinner of the Harvard Law School Association in honor of Professor C. C. Langdell (June 25, 1895); reported in Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896). p. 67-68.
1890s

George Washington in a letter to William Pearce at Mount Vernon (Philadelphia 24th Feby 1794), The Writings of George Washington, Bicentennial Edition 1939, p.279 books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=WIGyAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA279&dq=hemp, and founders.archives.gov https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-15-02-0210
This quote is often confused with Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere! George Washington Spurious Quotations http://www.mountvernon.org/research-collections/digital-encyclopedia/article/spurious-quotations/
1790s

2013, Remarks on Economic Mobility (December 2013)
Context: If you still don’t like Obamacare -- and I know you don’t even though it’s built on market-based ideas of choice and competition in the private sector, then you should explain how, exactly, you’d cut costs, and cover more people, and make insurance more secure. You owe it to the American people to tell us what you are for, not just what you’re against. That way we can have a vigorous and meaningful debate. That’s what the American people deserve. That’s what the times demand. It’s not enough anymore to just say we should just get our government out of the way and let the unfettered market take care of it -- for our experience tells us that’s just not true.