
As quoted in Philosophers of the Earth : Conversations with Ecologists (1972) by Anne Chisholm
Source: Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies - (Second Edition), Chapter 3, Outside Government, But Not Just Looking In, p. 65
As quoted in Philosophers of the Earth : Conversations with Ecologists (1972) by Anne Chisholm
America's Drug Forum interview (1991)
Context: It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users.
Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.
"Fooling the People as a Fine Art", La Follette's Magazine (April 1918)
“Government can't do anything for you except in proportion as it can do something to you.”
As quoted in "Broken Government: Where the right went wrong," CNN (2006-11-03).
Source: Speech at a Republican Banquet, Chicago, Illinois, December 10, 1856 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln2/1:413?rgn=div1;view=fulltext; see Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), p. 532
The Rights of Conscience Inalienable (1791)
Context: Government has no more to do with the religions opinions of men, than it has with the principles of mathematics. Let every man speak freely without fear, maintain the principles that he believes, worship according to his own faith, either one God, three Gods, no God, or twenty Gods; and let government protect him in so doing, i. e., see that he meets with no personal abuse, or loss of property, from his religious opinions. (p. 184)
“Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.”
Source: The Complete Fairy Tales