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People who dwell in love do love the Lord with all their heart, but they know, say, and perceive that all love comes from the Lord and from nowhere else, as does all life and so all happiness. Not the smallest measure of love, life, or happiness do they claim to possess on their own.
– Emmanuel Swedenborg – Secrets of Heaven
“Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.” – United States Supreme Court Justice James Wilson
“That the people will have the virtue and intelligence to select men of
virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? – If there be not, we are
in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks – no form of Government,
can render us secure.” – James Madison
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
All men’s souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine. – Socrates
“The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.” – Thomas Paine
“The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.”
– The Federalist
“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”
― Marcus Aurelius
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.
– Plato
“I am compelled to act as if free will existed, because if I wish to live in a civilized society I must act responsibly.”
– Alfred Einstein
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-John Adams
“(T)he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This ‘liberty’ is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms in the United States; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints.”
— Justice John Marshall Harlan II, dissent in Poe v. Ullman
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By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.
– Socrates
“I have never thought, for my part, that man’s freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise
– Plato
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. – Thomas Jefferson
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
– U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson
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“Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state.”
– John Adams
“It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.”
― Thomas Sowell
“It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them they have been fooled.” – Mark Twain