James Bovard Quotes

We must educate ourselves and others about our precious civil liberties to ensure that we never accept demands that we give up our Constitution so that the government can pretend to protect us.

He who opposes the public liberty overthrows his own.

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.

Freedom is indivisible. As soon as one starts to restrict it, one enters upon a decline on which it is difficult to stop.

China after Olympics will progress very slowly. But the demands for freedom - on the part of ordinary people but also party members - won't be as easy to contain.

Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.

If dictatorship is the concentration of power, freedom consists in its diffusion.

I fear for the democratic system. And I fear for our liberties. Only a small group of people fights for our liberties. Once we start on the slippery slope and those people are put in jeopardy, then we're really in trouble.

Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.

The worst way to defend our freedom is to let our leaders start taking away our freedoms! It is exactly during times like these [a national crisis] that we need more freedom of speech, a strong and critical press, and a citizenry that is not afraid to stand up and say that the emperor has no clothes.

If it's not accepted that big government, fiat money, ignoring liberty, central economic planning, welfarism, and warfarism caused our crisis, we can expect a continuous and dangerous march toward corporatism and even fascism with even more loss of our liberties.

When the people contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything by their victory but new masters.

The government continues to erode our freedom.

I contend that the strongest of all governments is that which is most free.

Reformist kings can save their dynasties now by helping their countries move smoothly into democracy, or they will end their years in exile like the Russian aristocrats of a century earlier.

America is the first country... that can actually have a bloodless revolution.

You don't get the fox to be in charge of the chicken coop. You don't give the outgoing regime - which has been practicing dictatorship, is an authoritarian system, it's a bunch of military people - the task of changing Egypt into a second republic, a new Egypt with democracy, freedom, rights, etc.

Also, when you escape a Communist regime, you treasure liberty and you understand that as government and state expand, liberty must contract.

Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy.

Freedom can be killed by neglect as well as by direct attack.

The free world should not wait for dictatorial regimes to consent to reform.

We did not have a revolution in order to have a democracy.

My goal for the Arab world is to change the status quo, which is horrible politically, religiously, economically, in every way.

Any individual right or freedom is properly extended only to those who accept the fundamental rules of democracy. How … could any society survive which deliberately nursed its own avowed and irreconcilable assassin, and freely exposed its heart to his knife.

The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.