Read the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights and try to visualize what it must have been like to be free!

"America! America! God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law!" Katherine Lee Bates, America the Beautiful

"...when all government... in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated."  Thomas Jefferson, 1821

"I am for government that is rigorously frugal and simple, and not for one that multiplies offices to make partisans, that is to get votes, and by every device increases the public debt under the guise of being a public benefit." Thomas Jefferson

"every word of the Constitution decides a question between power and liberty." James Madison

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have"  Thomas Jefferson

"Our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a
blank paper by construction." Thomas Jefferson

"The constitution as many of us have understood it, the instrument that has meant so much to us, is gone. The guarantees heretofore supposed to protect against arbitrary action have been swept away. The powers of Congress have been so enlarged that now no man can tell their limitations."  Mr. Justice James C. McReynolds, 1935, U.S. Supreme Court (1914-1941).

"Liberty is the rain forest, the welfare state is a zoo. In the rain forest people may be eaten by lions, but in the zoo they are fed to the lions." Paraphrased from someone.

The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 

Archives.gov:

• The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 
• The Constitution of the United States, September 17, 1787  
• Bill of Rights, December 15, 1791  
  Amendments 2, 4, 9, and 10 are my personal favorites.
• The Federalist Papers 

Other Resources 

"No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little." Edmund Burke

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."  Albert Einstein

"The more corrupt the government, the greater the number of laws"  Tacitus

"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated into the hands of the few and the Republic is destroyed. " Abraham Lincoln after the War Between the States

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction -- we didn't pass it on to our children in the blood-stream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it was like in the U.S. when men were free." Ronald Regan, 1950s when he was still "just" a film star.

"[I swear] I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God." Standard Form 61, Appointment Affidavits, the oath taken by all new Federal employees.

"I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but the people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take power from them, but to inform them by education." Thomas Jefferson, 1820.

" ... confidence in rulers is everywhere the parent of despotism -- free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; ... In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." Thomas Jefferson, 1798.

"If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn't thinking." General George C Patton

"I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. We are no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." President Wilson said in 1919 (note the Federal Reserve, Income tax, and direct election of Senators were passed in 1913)

"You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions - or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often that not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew."
Ayn Rand, "Philosophy: Who Needs It," Philosophy: Who Needs It

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