Some thoughts occasioned by the events of today ...

• "If the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system."

• Samuel Johnson, Life of Samuel Johnson (1763)

• "When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right."

• Victor Hugo

• "All oppressed people are authorized, wherever they can, to rise and break their fetters."

• Henry Clay, Speech, U.S. house of representatives, (March 24, 1818)

• "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."

• Abraham Lincoln

• "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

• John F. Kennedy, In a speech at the White House, (1962)

• "When the government is dissolved, the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative, differing from the other, by the change of persons, or form, or both, as they shall find it most for their safety and good: for the society can never, by the fault of another, lose the native and original right it has to preserve itself"

• John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Section 220, (1690)

• "Must men alone be debarred the common privilege of opposing force with force, which nature allows so freely to all other creatures for their preservation from injury? I answer: Self-defence is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community..."

• John Barclay, contra Monarchom. 1. iii. c. 8.

• "If therefore any future prince should endeavour to subvert the constitution by breaking the original contract between king and people, should violate the fundamental laws, and should withdraw himself out of the kingdom; we are now authorized to declare that this conjunction of circumstances would amount to an abdication, and the throne would be thereby vacant."
  

• William Blackstone, Blackstone's Commentaries on The Law (1765)

• "In the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right's least attractive practitioners."

• Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It?
  

• "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the Governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to Institute new Government...."
  

• Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

TAGS: Quotes, Politics