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"Your Liberty is Our Interest"

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The difference between a Republic and a Democracy –

(quotes provided by Bernie Kunkel)

“In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”   ----Thomas Jefferson

“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”     --James Madison (Federalist Papers)

“Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.”    ---- Founding Father, Fisher Ames

“Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation.”                       --Karl Marx 

“In a republic, the importance of the central government, seen as an economic parasite and a potential tyrant, is rightly minimized.  By contrast, our democracy today, like all humanistic democracies before it, is nothing more than mob rule—the rule of the majority—where the federal government becomes a criminal, stealing from the productive and giving to the unproductive; where the government makes ungodly laws and politicians play God, relying ultimately upon the force of violence.”  R.E. McMaster, Jr. in his book   No Time For Slaves

“If an acquaintance with the Constitution and laws of our country be requisite to preserve the blessings of freedom to the people, it necessarily follows that those who are to frame laws or administer the government should possess a thorough knowledge of these subjects.  For what can be more absurd than that a person wholly ignorant of the Constitution should presume to make laws pursuant thereto?  Or that one who neither understands the Constitution nor the law, should boldly adventure to administer the government!”   ----Blackstone’s Commentaries   preface by St. George Tucker  1803

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