Michael Posner Quotes

The greatest threat to our freedom is an all powerful federal government.

The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty.

The proper balance between individual liberty and central authority is a very ancient problem.

People should be free, people should be unencumbered by regulation as much as possible, that big government always goes corrupt and the truth shall always set you free.

Just the concept of personal freedom within a democracy, for instance, is a relatively young idea - only about 300 years old in this country.

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P. J. O'Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.

Be most on guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

There exists in modem America the necessity for protecting all of us from arbitrary action by governments more powerful and more pervasive than any in our ancestors’ time.

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

We do not want to place more power in the hands of government to investigate and regulate the lives, the conduct and the freedom of America's workers.

The liberal, emphasizing the civil and property rights of the individual, insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the state his servant.

Every amendment which I am convinced will have the tendency to lesson the danger of civil liberty by the central government will receive my sincere approbation.

It must never be forgotten ... that the liberties of the people are not so safe under the gracious manner of government as by the limitation of power.

Who are a free people? Not those over whom government is exercised, but those who live under a government so constitutionally checked and controlled that proper provision is made against its being otherwise exercised

There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders.

America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as any threat from abroad

The rights to life, liberty and property were not meant to be subject to the vagaries of majority rule.

The Constitution is not about restricting the people; it is about restricting the government.

If you aren't free to protect yourself when the government puts its thumb on that freedom, then you're not free at all.

Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

Individual liberty, the basic underpinning of American society, requires constant defense against the encroachment of the state.

The Democratic Party will never desert the freedoms of our people under the guise of pretending to protect them.

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.