Dangerous Quote by Thomas Paine

“An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.…

— Thomas Paine

Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men…

— Friedrich August von Hayek

“The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious,... but by those…

— Will Durant

There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia that one is at a loss…

— Alexander Hamilton

“The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It…

— Thomas Jefferson

“We Americans seem to derive a great deal of pleasure out of punishing those who fail to measure up to our standards of morality…

— Neal Boortz

Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense;…

— Frederic Bastiat

A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious. . . . When conducted with magnanimity, justice and humanity, it ought to command…

— Alexander Hamilton

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

— Robert Kennedy

This is the part of a great man, after he has maturely weighed all circumstances, to punish the guilty, to spare the many, and…

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for the crimes they…

— Harry S. Truman

Can a free people restrain crime without sacrificing fundamental liberties and a heritage of compassion?... Let us show that we can temper together those…

— Gerald R. Ford