How much more PROOF do we need?

Sic Semper Tyrannis

(Thus ever to tyrants!)

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

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Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?

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

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The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedoms.

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The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.

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We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.

- William O. Douglas
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I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

- THOMAS JEFFERSON
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A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

- Edward R. Murrow
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When law and morality contradict each other the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his sense of morality or losing his respect for the law.

- Frederick Bastiat
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Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the 1st Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press.

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Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

- Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice
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Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.

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Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

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Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

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The most important political office is that of the private citizen.

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Those who won our independence... valued liberty as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.

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To declare that the end justifies the means, to declare that the government may commit crimes, would bring terrible retribution.

- Louis D. Brandeis, Judge
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The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.

- William J. Brennan, Jr., Judge
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And if that independence is seriously eroded, it will be hard to protect those things that this country was based upon.

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It's important to every American that the law protect his or her basic liberty.

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You can have many different selection systems, but the bottom line has to be a system that, once the judge takes office that judge will feel that he or she is to decide the case without reference to the popular thing or the popular will of the moment.

Stephen Breyer, Judge
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Judges rule on the basis of law, not public opinion, and they should be totally indifferent to pressures of the times.

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We may have lured judges into roaming at large in the constitutional field.

- Warren E. Burger, Chief Justice of the United States
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As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.

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Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.

- Felix Frankfurter, United States Supreme Court Associate Justice
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Law not served by power is an illusion; but power not ruled by law is a menace which our nuclear age cannot afford.

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The basic guarantees of our Constitution are warrants for the here and now, and unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason, they are to be promptly fulfilled.

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The concept of neutrality can lead to a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it.

- Arthur J. Goldberg, Judge
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No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.

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Those who own the country ought to govern it.

- John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States
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Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

Thurgood Marshall, justice of the United States Supreme Court
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Also, in a deeper sense, the Ten Commandments are the basis of our freedom of conscience, which flows from the first table of the law.

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And government's only role is to secure our rights for us.

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And indeed, it is the right of the states to acknowledge God, as it is the right of the federal government to acknowledge its source of power.

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And that's not only true with this judge, but also with many of the federal courts across our land who seem to think, erroneously, that the acknowledgement of God is synonymous with religion.

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Anytime you deny the acknowledgement of God you are undermining the entire basis for which our country exists.

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Because, if there is no God, then man's power is the controlling aspect, and therefore power will be centralized.

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But separation of church and state was never meant to separate God and government.

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But today, government is taking those rights from us, pretending that it gives us our rights. Indeed, those rights come from God, and it was recognized throughout our history as such.

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I would say that there's not much difference these days between those who run under one party or another because they're all after seeking power.

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If God gives you rights, no man and no government can take them away from you.

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It can have a secular purpose and have a relationship to God because God was presumed to be both over the state and the church, and separation of church and state was never meant to separate God from government.

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It is altogether proper for people to recognize a sovereign God.

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It would bother me if a judge told me how I had to believe.

No, because this country was not founded upon the Qur'an. It was not founded upon a Muslim faith. It was founded upon a Christian faith and the acknowledgement of God of the holy scriptures.

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Rights come from God, not from government.

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The acknowledgement of God was the very reason for the existence of this country.

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The basic premise of the Constitution was a separation of powers and a system of checks and balances because man was perceived as a fallen creature and would always yearn for more power.

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The Commandments were placed in the court to acknowledge the moral foundation of our law and the foundation of our government.

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The whole basis of the Constitution was a restriction of power, and the whole basis of the federalist system was that there was not one sovereign centralized power from which all authority flows.

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They don't want to be reminded that there is an authority higher than the authority of the state.

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To do my duty, I must obey God.

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To fail to recognize who that God is is not only illogical and ridiculous, it is also detrimental to the court system.

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We are asserting exactly the opposite, that the state must acknowledge God and that our freedoms flow from that God, the Judeo-Christian God.

- Roy Moore, Judge
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It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.

Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.

- Sandra Day O'Connor, Associate Justice United States Supreme Court
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The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.

In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property.

Potter Stewart, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
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A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must, in practice, be a bad government.
And it is no less true, that personal security and private property rest entirely upon the wisdom, the stability, and the integrity of the courts of justice.

- Joseph Story, Judge