Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Liberty Quotes



"[The commerce clause was written] in the horse-and-buggy age ... since that time … we have developed an entirely different philosophy. ... We are interdependent, we are tied in together. And the hope has been that we could, through a period of years, interpret the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution in the light of these new things that have come to the country. It has been our hope that under the interstate commerce clause we could recognize by legislation and by judicial decision that a harmful practice in one section of the country could be prevented on the theory that it was doing harm to another section of the country. That was why the Congress for a good many years, and most lawyers, have had the thought that in drafting legislation we could depend on an interpretation that would enlarge the constitutional meaning of interstate commerce to include not only those matters of direct interstate commerce, but also those matters which indirectly affect interstate commerce." -Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd US President Source: May 31, 1935 press conference, responding to a Supreme Court decision that defined the commerce clause narrowly enough to interfere with his regulation of farm products
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Franklin.Roosevelt.Quote.522D

"As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship." -Justice John Paul Stevens U. S. Supreme Court Justice Source: Majority Opinion, Communications Decency Act, 26 June 1997
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/John.Paul.Stevens.Quote.30F1

"The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, or else there would be no point in the government’s involvement at all." -Lew Rockwell [Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.] (1944- ) Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Lew.Rockwell.Quote.7ADC

No comments:

Post a Comment