The right of the people to alter or abolish governments is not unqualified...The people have a right to overthrow only governments destructive of certain ends, and to institute new governments only as they are conducive to the same ends. Those ends however are fixed by the nature of man. The people are at full liberty to deliberate as to what means conduce to those ends, but they do not deliberate as to the ends themselves.

JAFFA, HARRY V., Storm Over the Constitution (1999)

I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

JEFFERSON, THOMAS, Letter to James Madison, 1787

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

JEFFERSON, THOMAS, Letter to William S. Smith, 1787

Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence.

LOCKE, JOHN, quoted in Conceived in Liberty, Vol. I, by MURRAY ROTHBARD

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

KAFKA, FRANZ

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

KENNEDY, JOHN FITZGERALD, March 13, 1962

Obedience to authority is so well secured, that it is wild to imagine, that any number of men, formidable enough to disturb a settled State, can unite together and hope to overturn it, till the public grievances are so enormous, the oppression so great, and the disaffection so universal, that there can be no question remaining, whether their calamities to be real or imaginary, and whether the magistrate has protected or endeavoured to destroy his people.

TRENCHARD, JOHN and GORDON, THOMAS, Cato’s Letters, quoted in ROTHBARD, MURRAY, Conceived in Liberty, Vol. II, The Growth of Libertarian Thought

 

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