John C. Calhoun Quotes

[There is no] right of Congress ... to force a good thing upon a people who are unwilling to receive it. The great principle is the right of every community to judge and decide for itself whether a thing is right or wrong, whether it would be good or evil to adopt it.... Whenever you put a limitation upon the right of any people to decide what laws they want, you have destroyed the fundamental principle of self-government.

No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

The only moral Foundation of Government is the Consent of the People. But to what an Extent Shall We carry this Principle? Shall We Say, that every Individual of the Community, old and young, male and female, as well as rich and poor, must consent, expressly to every Act of Legislation? No, you will say. This is impossible. How then does the Right arise in the Majority to govern the Minority, against their Will? Whence arises the Right of the Men to govern Women, without their Consent? Whence the Right of the old to bind the Young, without theirs.

The rule of liberty that all government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self government. We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent.

Civil liberty is the power of a civil society or state to govern itself by its own discretion or by laws of its own making, without being subject to the impositions of any power in appointing and directing which the collective body of the people have no concern and over which they have no control

I believe in the America people's ability to govern themselves. If government would just get out of the way and allow them to lead their lives as they choose, they will succeed.

I'm a hardcore libertarian - I want everything legal - but I also believe that you have the right to free association.

The important matter is freedom. When the people choose what they want, it is good for them and for us.

Our Constitution does not profess to have been established simply by the majority, but by 'the people' - the minority as much as the majority.

Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

I feel that the majority of people should decide for themselves what kind of government they want.

It’s very basic in the Bill of Rights, he says. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, whether the majority agrees with them or not. Rights are in some sense anti-democratic; to trumpet democracy as the all-important value is to denigrate them.”

If government be founded in the consent of the people, it can have no power over any individual by whom that consent is refused.

I shall on all subjects have a policy to recommend, but none to enforce against the will of the people.

We must consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.

The touchstone of everything that can be concluded as a law for a people lies in the question whether the people could have imposed such a law on itself.

Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it.

True republicanism is the sovereignty of the people. There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate

Men are born free, that since they begin with no government, they must therefore institute government by voluntary agreement, and thus government must be their agent, not their superior.

… every nation, when able and agreed, has a right to set up over themselves any form of government which to them may appear most conducive to their common welfare.

The real strength of the democratic theory in opposition to the fascist or communist is that the fascist frankly states that certain people will tell other people what they shall do to be happy, and those other people have little or nothing to say about it. In theory the communists were to do everything in common, in practice a small group there also tells other people what they shall do to achieve their objectives. So far more nearly than any other form of government, the democratic form has allowed people to shape their own government

The United States supports the idea that every people should have the right to make a free choice as to the kind of government they want.

The right of choosing, yea of changing their own government is by the grant of God himself in the People.

Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.