Alexis de Tocqueville

[People] think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

True friends of liberty… ought constantly to be on the alert to prevent the power of government from lightly sacrificing the private rights of individuals to the general execution of its designs. At such times no citizen is so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed; no private rights are so unimportant that they can be surrendered with impunity to the caprices of a government… [because] men accustom themselves to sacrifice private interest without scruple and to trample on the rights of individuals in order more speedily to accomplish any public purpose.

The Revolution… was the result of a mature and reflecting preference for freedom, and not of a vague or ill-defined craving for independence.

The democratic tendency… leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the rights of private persons… often sacrificed without regret and almost always violated without remorse… men become less and less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them.

It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority… averts all dangers from my path… if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.

The Federal Constitution… disavowed beforehand the habitual use of compulsion in enforcing the decisions of the majority.

The core of the anarchist tradition, as I understand it, is that power is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate.

We should be adult and grown up and decriminalise cannabis

It doesn’t matter who they vote for, they always vote for us…

We do not want a single foot of foreign territory; but of our territory we shall not surrender a single inch to anyone.

Kim Jong Un just stated that the Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

[on Michelle Obama] She’s fundamentally honest – goes out there, speaks her mind, jokes. She doesn’t parse her words or select them with an antenna for political correctness.

America didn’t invent human rights. Those rights are common to all people: nations, cultures, and religions cannot choose to simply opt out of them.

Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.

I’ve seen firsthand that being president doesn’t change who you are. It reveals who you are.

There’s a whole filtering process that enables people to rise through the system into managerial roles only if they’ve demonstrated that they’ve successfully internalized the values demanded by private power.

[on the 2016 election] When the most qualified person running was a woman, and look what we did instead, I mean that says something about where we are. That’s what we have to explore, because if we as women are still suspicious of one another, if we still have this crazy, crazy bar for each other that we don’t have for men… if we’re not comfortable with the notion that a woman could be our president compared to… what, then we have to have those conversations with ourselves as women.

Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.

There were no strategic mistakes that could affect Russia’s history and it further development. No, there were no such mistakes. Tactical errors were made in some less significant options, problems and so on. But, on the whole, Russia embarked on a correct path and it changed.

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as [inherently] exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.