Strom Thurmond Quotes

For many, the recent disclosure of massive warrantless surveillance programs of all citizens by the Obama administration has brought back memories of George Orwell's '1984.' Another Orwell book seems more apt as the White House and its allies try to contain the scandal: 'Animal Farm.'

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has used that tragic event as a justification to rip up our constitution and our civil liberties. And I honestly believe that one or two 9/11s, and martial law will be declared in our country and we're inching towards a police state.

I believe that all forms of socialism have been proven over time to result in a loss of both economic and civil liberties, with increasing poverty.

When the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo, it's time for the Director no longer to be the Director.

This is the first time that the Federal Government has told a free people what kind of government they must have. If they can do that, they can tell you what time to go to bed, what time to get up, and whether to have pork and beans for lunch.

Aided by a little sophistry on the words "general welfare," the federal government claims a right to do not only the acts to effect that which are specifically enumerated and permitted, but whatsoever they shall think or pretend will be for the general welfare.

A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime. All that is required is that we take away the criminals’ rights – which, of course, are our own. Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel a sense of security from the new totalitarian state.

The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie.

Today, the Federal Government is simply trying to do too much.

I wouldn't want to have the thought police going to people's homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don't want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.

You've got the NSA doing all this collecting of material on all of its citizens - that's what the SS, the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, and the NKVD did.

You can't be citing Japanese internment camps for anything the president elect is going to do!

Call me an alarmist, but we are witnessing the beginning of the most frightening period of government tyranny in our nation's history.

If you're tempted to believe with Governor Cuomo that government is just like Mom and Pop rather than Big Brother, just ask yourself one question: When was the last time all the IRS wanted from you was a hug and a kiss.

One of the basic philosophical tenets of conservatism - which says that the more power devolves from the federal government to the states, the greater individual freedom grows - is just flatly contradicted by crucial junctures in the country's life, most conspicuously in the 1860s and 1960s, when it's been the federal government that's interceded against the states to secure individual freedom.

These last few years we've seen an unacceptable abuse of power, having a president whose priority is expanding his own power.

If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

As soon as people drop the reins on government, government will leash the people.

Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx - first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a Government being Big Brother.

The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

Yeah, but I forgot to take my George Orwell-shaped multivitamins along with my breakfast bowl of Big Brother Os this morning.

America needs fewer laws, not more prisons. By trying to seize far more power than is necessary over American citizens, the federal government is destroying its own legitimacy. We face a choice not of anarchy or authoritarianism, but a choice of limited government or unlimited government .

Laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.

I'm not worried that tomorrow there will be a battalion outside your Greenwich Village apartment. I'm worried about things like the McCain Liberman bill that would define enemy belligerents so loosely it would include Americans, which is just like Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini.

National Health? Socialized pension funds? State-controlled television? Search and seizure laws? Forfeiture laws? If we're not living in the Soviet Union of the United States we certainly have returned to 1776 and 'taxation without representation.'