Teddy Roosevelt said this on May 12, 1900 .. .while he was still governor of  New York. Too bad we don't have more people who feel this way today. 

 "We can afford to differ on the currency, the tariff, and foreign policy;  but we cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our  republic permanently to endure ..."  "Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him  in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity."  "The weakling and the coward cannot be saved by honesty alone; but without  honesty, the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should be  hunted down by every lover of righteousness." "No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can  possibly do his duty by the community...."  "'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence  of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath  or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns  perjury, he is guilty under the statute law."  "Under the higher law, under the great law of morality and righteousness, he  is precisely as guilty if, instead of lying in a court, he lies in a  newspaper or on the stump; and in all probability, the evil effects of his  conduct are infinitely more widespread and more pernicious." 

 This is one of my favorites. From Alexander Tyler. No, he wasn't writing  about the United States. This quote is well over one hundred years old.  Tyler was writing about the fall of the Athenian Republic.

 "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only  exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the  public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the  candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the  result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed  by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has  been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following  sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great  courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance  to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy,  from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."

 "In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other." --Voltaire

 "Do we really think that a government-dominated education is going to  produce citizens capable of dominating their government, as the education of  a truly vigilant self-governing people requires?" (ALAN KEYES)

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." --William Pitt the Younger, British Prime Minister 1783-1801 and 1804-1806

"For in a Republic, who is "the country?" Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant--merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them." --Mark Twain

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." --10th Amendment to the United States Constitution

"We, the people, are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts; not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow men who pervert the Constitution." --Abraham Lincoln

"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism', they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened." --Norman Thomas, former U.S. Socialist Party Presidential Candidate

"The point to remember is that what the government gives, it must first take away." --John S. Coleman

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. --Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man - in temperament, character, and capacity - and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so. --Frank Chodorov

The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery.  --Winston Churchill

My father liked to connect the progress of our corner shop with the great complex romance of international trade which recruited people all over the world to ensure that a family in Grantham could have on their table rice from India, coffee from Kenya, sugar from the West Indies and spices from five continents. Before I had read a line from the great liberal economists, I knew from my father's accounts that the free market was like a vast sensitive nervous system, responding to events and signals all over the world to meet the ever changing needs of people in different countries, from different classes, of different religions, with a kind of benign indifference to their status. Governments acted on a much smaller store of information and, by contrast, were themselves "blind forces" blundering about in the dark, and obstructing the operations of markets rather than improving them. Margaret Thatcher. "The Downing Street Years". 1993. Introduction.

Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. [Because] if I do not like what my local community does, I can move to another local community... [and] if I do not like what my state does, I can move to another. [But] if I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations. - Milton Friedman

[The] Artic National Wildlife Refuge is the poster child of cake-and-eat-it-too eco-petulance. It's a place so remote and so desolate that not one American in a million will ever see it. Exploration would affect no more than eight percent of the refuge. Rather than disturb the mating grounds of caribou, however, our exquisite environmentalists have prevented exploration of what could be our next Prudhoe Bay. And for reasons of nothing less than hysteria, they have also blocked the one supply side solution to the environment vs. energy conundrum: nuclear power. Nuclear is the one mode of electricity generation that avoids nearly all traditional environmental damage--the noxious gases, the particulates, and best of all, carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas. Nuclear waste is not a trivial problem, but it has the distinct advantage of being concentrated and not dispersed in the atmosphere. Yet the allergy to nuclear is so extreme and irrational that even in the midst of this crisis, no one dares mention it as a long-term alternative. - Charles Krauthammer