Ron Paul Quotes

#1. The problem is that democracy is not freedom. Democracy is simply majoritarianism, which is inherently incompatible with real freedom. Our founding fathers clearly understood this.

Ron Paul

#2. But, no matter how big or small dictators are, they all accept 100 percent the principle that granting government authority to manipulate our lives and control our property is legitimate and morally acceptable.

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#3. Bush humble foreign policy was hijacked into nation-building.

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#4. It is dissent from government policies which defines the true Patriot

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#5. The law cannot make a wicked person virtuous ... God's grace alone can accomplish such a thing.

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#6. The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.

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#7. I see this piece of legislation as essentially being a declaration of virtual war. It is giving the President tremendous powers to pursue war efforts against a sovereign nation ... I think it is another example of a flawed foreign policy that we have followed for a good many decades.

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#8. The state cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man.

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#9. But whether the resistance against government tyrants is non-violent or physically violent, the effort to overthrow state oppression qualifies as true patriotism.

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#10. I am just absolutely convinced that the best formula for giving us peace and preserving the American way of life is freedom, limited government, and minding our own business overseas.

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#11. Once created, federal programs are nearly impossible to eliminate.

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#12. The only thing we should prohibit is violence.

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#13. After years spent in Washington, I have become more aware than ever of the government's ineptness and the likelihood of its making mistakes. I no longer trust the U.S. government to invoke and carry out a death sentence under any conditions.

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#14. I would say nobody is perfect. I don't know all the answers. I have don't want to run people's lives and run the world and run the economy. So, my qualifications are a little bit different.

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#15. They ask me if I'm going to quit. I thought we were just getting started. We have a revolution to fight, a country to change.

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#16. Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.

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#17. The true patriot is motivated by a sense of responsibility and out of self interest for himself, his family, and the future of his country to resist government abuse of power. He rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state.

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#18. Astonishingly, American taxpayers now will be forced to finance a multi-billion dollar jobs program in Iraq. Suddenly the war is about jobs. We export our manufacturing jobs to Asia, and now we plan to export our welfare jobs to Iraq, all at the expense of the poor and the middle class here at home.

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#19. I am absolutely convinced, you never have to give up any of your freedoms in order to be secure.

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#20. But the war proponents tried desperately to continue the glorification of war by praising anyone who had been sent off to war or even just put on a uniform. Troops and veterans were placed on pedestals as great heroes - warriors who had saved us from some imagined modern-day Hitler.

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#21. Everyone assumes America must play the leading role in crafting some settlement or compromise between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington explicitly warned against involving ourselves in foreign conflicts.

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#22. Our Constitution, which was intended to limit government power and abuse, has failed,

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#23. You know, the greatest hoax I think that has been around in many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming. You notice they don't call it global warming anymore. It's weather control.

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#24. A free society acknowledges that authority over education begins with the family. I am not saying that a free society grants that authority. I do not believe that such authority is delegated by society.

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#25. Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution says Congress has the ability to coin money and regulate the currency and doesn't say anything about gold or silver.

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#26. Quantitative easing is just the latest chapter in the Federal Reserve's hundred-year history of failure. ( ... ) The American people have suffered long enough under a monetary policy controlled by an unaccountable, secretive central bank. It is time to finally audit - and then end - the Fed.

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#27. Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy.

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#28. In addition to Eisenhower identifying the military-industrial complex, we now have the police-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, the surveillance-industrial complex, and the media-industrial complex.

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#29. No one talks about the real ethics disaster in Washington. It's that many members of Congress will listen to any argument against a bill except for two: that it's not moral or that it's not Constitutional.

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#30. I have this terrible habit of wanting to try to be consistent and develop a philosophy that's coherent.

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#31. Who's married and who isn't married. I have my standards but I shouldn't have to impose my standards on others. Other people have their standards and they have no right to impose their marriage standards on me.

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#32. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.

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#33. There should essentially be no limits to the voluntary definition of marriage.

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#34. What we need to do is not only live within our means, but start paying down the deficit, and offer an opportunity at least for the next generation to get out.

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#35. We have to restore confidence that the marketplace can deliver services as well as it can goods.

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#36. With the exception of the military industrial complex, we all want a more peaceful world.

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#37. Your money has never been safe in the government's hands, and it never will be. Governments spend money; it's just their nature.

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#38. Today's events are reminiscent of the Old Testament story of how the Israelites demanded a king over God's objection. They believed that a king would give them peace and security. The results proved otherwise.

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#39. Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to steal for you.

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#40. If you sacrifice liberty for security, you will lose both.

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#41. There is nothing wrong with describing Conservatism as protecting the Constitution, protecting all things that limit government. Government is the enemy of liberty. Government should be very restrained.

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#42. If you drink too much, you go out and you harm to somebody, you have to suffer the consequences. Same way with health matters. You don't have the right to demand that someone else take care of you because of your habits.

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#43. I want to be president mainly for what I don't want to do: I don't want to run your life, I don't want to run the economy, and I don't want to police the world.

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#44. Close Dept. of Education, but don't dismantle public schools.

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#45. Israeli government & the neocons want US to bomb Iran.

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#46. Have you noticed the debt is exploding? And it's not all because of Medicare.

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#47. September 11th does not justify ignoring the Constitution by creating broad new federal police powers. The rule of law is worthless if we ignore it whenever crises occur.

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#48. We don't need any troops abroad-they don't help our defense.

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#49. Only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions.

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#50. Once you get the government involved in agriculture you'll have nothing but problems and expenses.

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#51. No matter how many pro-freedom politicians we elect to office, the only way to guarantee constitutional government is through an educated and activist public devoted to the ideals of liberty.

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#52. If we are not even free anymore to decide something as basic as what we wish to eat or drink, how much freedom do we really have left?

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#53. Intellectually and compassionately explaining the reason freedom works is required for credibility.

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#54. During the last campaign I knew what was happening. You know, they mocked me for my foreign policy and they laughed at my monetary policy. No more. No more.

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#55. The Congress should not be creating money out of thin air, which is what Lincoln did when he created greenbacks. But it is a congressional responsibility to maintain gold and silver as a legal tender.

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#56. I want to just obey the Constitution.The Constitution says only gold and silver can be legal tender.

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#57. Under the United States Constitution, the federal government has no authority to hold states "accountable" for their education performance ... In the free society envisioned by the founders, schools are held accountable to parents, not federal bureaucrats.

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#58. Critics of NAFTA and CAFTA warned at the time that the agreements were actually a move toward ... an eventual merging of North America into a border-free area. Proponents of these agreements dismissed this as preposterous and conspiratorial. Now we see that the criticisms appear to be justified.

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#59. They've been taught by too many that this war was necessary when it isn't.

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#60. My message is simple - freedom works a lot better than the authoritarian style of government.

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#61. There was a time when a willingness to criticize one's own government when it was wrong was the very definition of patriotism.

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#62. What we need is a strong defense, but right now there is zero chance of an invasion by another country and right now we have more firepower than all other countries put together.

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#63. The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs.

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#64. Libertarians are incapable of being a racist, because racism is a collectivist idea.

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#65. If Iran invaded Israel, it's up to Congress to declare war.

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#66. Just think of what Woodrow Wilson stood for: he stood for world government. He wanted an early United Nations, League of Nations. But it was the conservatives, Republicans, that stood up against him.

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#67. I have never met anyone who did not support our troops. Sometimes, however, we hear accusations that someone or some group does not support the men and women serving in our Armed Forces. But this is pure demagoguery, and it is intellectually dishonest.

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#68. By the way, when I say cut taxes, I don't mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing.

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#69. Truth is treason in the empire of lies.

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#70. I do not have much confidence in the political system and never did. My goal has always been to change people's minds because as long as people demand more government, they will get it.

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#71. Nothing good can come from the Federal Reserve. It is the biggest taxer of them all. Diluting the value of the dollar by increasing its supply is a vicious, sinister tax on the poor and middle class.

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#72. Secession is a deeply American principle. This country was born through secession.

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#73. Freedom is living without government coercion. So when a politician talks about freedom for this group or that, ask yourself whether he is advocating more government action or less.

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#74. True prosperity can only come from a healthy economy and sound money. That can only be achieved in a free society.

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#75. I'm convinced that you never have to give up liberties to be safe. I think you're less safe when you give up your liberties.

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#76. Reject the phony Patients' Bill of Rights ... We don't have to continue down the path of socialized medical care, especially in America where free markets have provided so much for so many.

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#77. Suicide terrorism stops when we stop intervening abroad.

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#78. One thing is certain: those who worked and voted for less government, the very foot soldiers in the conservative revolution, have been deceived. Today, the ideal of limited government has been abandoned by the GOP, and real conservatives find their views no longer matter.

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#79. We'd love it if we could all just come home and not worry about the rest of the world. But the problem is, they attacked us on 9/11. We were here; they attacked us.

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#80. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.

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#81. As recent as the year 2000 we won elections by saying we shouldn't be the policemen of the world, and that we should not be nation building. And its time we got those values back into this country.

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#82. I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.

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#83. The Federal Reserve and Congress have systematically taught the American people to trust the government and that caution in spending is harmful to the economy.

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#84. How did we win the election in the year 2000? We talked about a humble foreign policy: No nation-building; don't police the world. That's conservative, it's Republican, it's pro-American - it follows the founding fathers. And, besides, it follows the Constitution.

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#85. Everyone on the Commission assumes that 9/11 resulted from a lack of government action. No one in Washington has raised the question of whether our shortcomings, brought to light by 9/11, could have been a result of too much government.

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#86. I would absolutely never use the federal government to enforce the law of using marijuana

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#87. Let the revolution begin.

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#88. The freer the market is and the more respect you have for private property, the better the environment is protected.

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#89. Peaceful civil disobedience to unjust laws, which I support with every fiber of my being, can sometimes be necessary at any level of government. It falls upon the people, in the last resort, to stand against injustice no matter where it occurs.

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#90. There's not much you can do about the bias of the media other than try to counteract it by putting the truth out best you can, and the Internet has been a great weapon for holding the media accountable.

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#91. De Tocqueville admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it.

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#92. There is no reason, in a free society, that farmers shouldn't be allowed to raise hemp. Hemp is a good product.

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#93. History has shown that the masses have been quite receptive to the promises of authoritarians which are rarely if ever fulfilled.

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#94. You don't have freedom because you are a hyphenated American; you have freedom because you are an individual, and that should be protected.

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#95. In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, however, we are in big trouble.

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#96. If people are smokers, don't they have to pay more? Sometimes, you get your insurance cheaper if you are a nonsmoker. So, let the markets sort this out and insurance sort it out, but not having dictates by the government saying thou, you must do this and your behavior doesn't matter, you know?

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#97. Get rid of IRS; get rid of income tax; get rid of spending.

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#98. The Federal Reserve System is nothing more than legalized counterfeit.

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#99. We can achieve much more in peace than we can ever achieve in these needless, unconstitutional, undeclared wars.

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#100. Americans are tired of the games and the lies of today's media. They want the truth. Imagine this. No censors, no barricades, no statists. We will be able to engage viewers directly on subjects that matter most to them, from finances to civil liberties to foreign policy.

Ron Paul