Daniel Webster Quotes

This system of military conscription … is not only inconsistent with the provisions and spirit of the Constitution, but also with all the principles of civil liberty.

A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.

Freedom is our most precious commodity and if we are not eternally vigilant, government will take it all away. Individual freedom demands individual responsibility.

All our rights are gradually eroded as government gets bigger.

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.

No government really rooted in parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong …

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.

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

The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.

I think if you open the door to government control of television, then you let in a host of questions about rights.

Our government shouldn't tell us where to travel and where not to travel.

If government can give you rights, government can take them away from you.

The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.

I don't like the idea that the government has so much of a say in things.

The government is supposed to conform to our will. By taking the most important thing you have, your health and your health care, and turning that over to the government, you fundamentally shift the power, a huge chunk of it, from the people to the government. This is not the direction that we want the government to go in this nation.

Americans chose a limited government that exists to protect our rights, not to grant them.

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 soldier then is, no matter in what light we examine his position, a ‘hired assassin’ – his first duty, he is told, is to ‘obey’. To obey whom? His superior officers, who in turn must obey the Government. When the mandate goes forth, ‘Kill’, he must kill and dare not ask the reason why. The government under whose orders he serves may have been elected to power on some question of internal administration … but as soon as it is in power it has the right to launch all the military and naval forces …

Nothing ... ought to more guarded against in a free state than making the military power ... a body too distinct from the people.

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

... to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.... Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia in order to raise an army upon their ruins.

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

This is the first step on the odious ground of conscription—a plan sir, which never will and never ought to be submitted to by this country while it retains one idea of civil freedom.

I succeeded in staying out of the military during the Vietnam War, and I would never assume the right to tell others to do a “duty” that I shirked.

Conscription may have been good for the country, but it damned near killed the country.