A free people [claim] their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.
–Thomas Jefferson, Rights of British America, 1774
Quotes
It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression … that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; … working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.
–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821
There is one big truth that used to hold from sea to shining sea and is now most keenly apprehended here: an argument against the individual right to bear arms is an argument that the average American is incompetent to contend with the most fundamental moral questions of life, death, and justice. It is an argument that assumes ordinary people cannot be entrusted with democracy.
– Joshua Treviño, “Founding Firearms,” Texas Monthly, April 2013
We’re learning more about the dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. It seems he amassed about $2 billion in personal fortune while president – and he was a socialist. Imagine how rich he could have been if he didn’t believe in redistribution of wealth.
–comedian Jay Leno
Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office. … Obama certainly doesn’t know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He’s so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix. In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn’t really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people’s buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway.
– Hot Air’s Allahpundit
We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Samuel Kercheval, 1816
To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.
–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, 6 April 1816
If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.
–James Madison, letter to Edmund Pendleton, 21 January 1792
Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? It is feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American. …[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
–A Pennsylvanian, The Pennsylvania Gazette, 20 February 1788
I don’t mean to be dismissive of Blackberry’s efforts as a company but I know where my loyalties are, and it’s not with android or apple or any company. It boils down to this–I would never ever tell anyone I care about to consider these phones. So, that’s what I think about Blackberry’s new stuff.
Briam Lam, The Wirecutter