Ron Paul quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Justifying conscription to promote the cause of liberty is one of the most bizarre notions ever conceived by man! Forced servitude, with the risk of death and serious injury as a price to live free, makes no sense.

  • When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.

  • If you like small government you need to work hard at having a strong national defense that is not so militant. Personal liberty is the purpose of government, to protect liberty - not to run your personal life, not to run the economy, and not to pretend that we can tell the world how they ought to live.

  • Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam.

  • A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank.

  • Aggression and forced redistribution of wealth has nothing to do with the teachings of the world's great religions.

  • Prices are going up. Unemployment continues to go up. And we have not had the necessary correction for the financial bubble created by our Federal Reserve system.

  • In time it will become clear to everyone that support for the policies of pre-emptive war and interventionist nation-building will have much greater significance than the removal of Saddam Hussein itself.

  • Think of what happened after 9/11, the minute before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq, and so the war drums beat.

  • I think a submarine is a very worthwhile weapon. I believe we can defend ourselves with submarines and all our troops back at home. This whole idea that we have to be in 130 countries and 900 bases... is an old-fashioned idea.

  • Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.

  • I am absolutely opposed to a national ID card. This is a total contradiction of what a free society is all about. The purpose of government is to protect the secrecy and the privacy of all individuals, not the secrecy of government. We don't need a national ID card.

  • 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.

  • Legitimate use of violence can only be that which is required in self-defense.

  • When things go badly, individuals look for scapegoats. I just do not believe that barbed-wire fences or guns on our border will solve any of our problems.

  • Of course I've already taken a very modest position on the monetary system, I do take the position that we should just end the Fed.

  • Having federal officials, whether judges, bureaucrats, or congressmen, impose a new definition of marriage on the people is an act of social engineering profoundly hostile to liberty.

  • 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.

  • All initiation of force is a violation of someone else's rights, whether initiated by an individual or the state, for the benefit of an individual or group of individuals, even if it's supposed to be for the benefit of another individual or group of individuals.

  • There is only one kind of freedom and that's individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.

  • 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.

  • I had the privilege of practicing medicine in the early '60s, before we had any government. It worked rather well, and there was nobody on the street suffering with no medical care.

  • Believe me, the next step is a currency crisis because there will be a rejection of the dollar, the rejection of the dollar is a big, big event, and then your personal liberties are going to be severely threatened.

  • Maybe we ought to consider a Golden Rule in foreign policy: Don't do to other nations what we don't want happening to us. We endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder why they get upset with us?

  • When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads.

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

  • What is not conservative about saying, 'Don't go to war unless we go to war properly with a full declaration of war and no other way?'

  • The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.

  • The obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.

  • Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy.

  • Believe me, the intellectual revolution is going on, and that has to come first before you see the political changes. That's where I'm very optimistic.

  • Deficits mean future tax increases, pure and simple. Deficit spending should be viewed as a tax on future generations, and politicians who create deficits should be exposed as tax hikers.

  • It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Once again, President Clinton is using American troops to deflect attention from his record of lies, distortions, obstructions of justice and abuse of power.

  • I have come to one firm conviction after these many years of trying to figure out the plain truth of things. The best chance for achieving peace and prosperity, for the maximum number of people worldwide, is to pursue the cause of liberty. If you find this to be a worthwhile message, spread it throughout the land.

  • I believe that when we overdo our military aggressiveness, it actually weakens our national defense. I mean, we stood up to the Soviets. They had 40,000 nuclear weapons. Now we're fretting day in and day and night about third-world countries that have no army, navy or air force.

  • Al-Awlaki was born here, he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. No one knows if he killed anybody. We know he might have been associated with the underwear bomber. But if the American people accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it's sad.

  • 1913 wasn't a very good year. 1913 gave us the income tax, the 16th amendment and the IRS.

  • I am convinced that there are more threats to American liberty within the 10 mile radius of my office on Capitol Hill than there are on the rest of the globe.

  • The original American patriots were those individuals brave enough to resist with force the oppressive power of King George...Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a blind desire for safety and security.

  • 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.

  • Demanding domestic security in times of war invites carelessness in preserving civil liberties and the right of privacy. Frequently the people are only too anxious for their freedoms to be sacrificed on the altar of authoritarianism thought to be necessary to remain safe and secure.

  • Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.

  • 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.

  • War is never economically beneficial except for those in position to profit from war expenditures.

  • I have a personal belief that you never have to give up liberty for security. You can still provide security without sacrificing our Bill of Rights.

  • A citizen walking through the airport today is bombarded with 1984-style propaganda messages that are designed to make us fear some amorphous threat and also be suspicious of others. The government designs these messages to make us feel dependent and heavily lorded over in every aspect of our lives. These messages are becoming ever more pervasive, hitting us even in grocery stores when we are shopping.

  • While President Obama was starting and expanding unconstitutiona l wars overseas, Bradley Manning, whose actions have caused exactly zero deaths, was shining light on the truth behind these wars.

  • Prices are going up. Unemployment is continue to go up. And we have not had the necessary correction for the financial bubble created by our Federal Reserve system.

  • Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven't had capitalism.

  • In the American political lexicon, 'change' always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.

  • The federal government overrules state laws where state laws permit medicinal marijuana for people dying of cancer. The federal government goes in and arrests these people, put them in prison with mandatory, sometimes life sentences. This war on drugs is totally out of control. If you want to regulate cigarettes and alcohol and drugs, it should be at the state level.

  • I like Mitt Romney as a person. I think he's a dignified person. But I have no common ground on economics. He doesn't worry about the Federal Reserve. He doesn't worry about foreign policy. He doesn't talk about civil liberties, so I would have a hard time to expect him to ever invite me to campaign with him.

  • My understanding is that espionage means giving secret or classified information to the enemy. Since Snowden shared information with the American people, his indictment for espionage could reveal (or confirm) that the US Government views you and me as the enemy.

  • Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war, anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon.

  • Welfarism and excessive spending and deficits and socialism divide us, because everybody has to go to Washington. Those who have the biggest clout, whose who are the best lobbyists, those who go and they grab. And whether it's the medical industrial complex, or the banking industry, or the military industrial complex, that's who ends up controlling our government.

  • 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.

  • Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals.

  • 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.

  • If it's not accepted that big government, fiat money, ignoring liberty, central economic planning, welfarism, and warfarism caused our crisis, we can expect a continuous and dangerous march toward corporatism and even fascism with even more loss of our liberties,

  • Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.

  • American voters should understand that Congress will always find a way to spend every last dollar sent to Washington. Remember, politicians get votes by promising everything to everyone, always at the expense of some other invisible taxpayers. ...The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard.

  • When we finally decide that drug prohibition has been no more successful than alcohol prohibition, the drug dealers will disappear.

  • 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.

  • The constant refrain that bringing our troops home would demonstrate a lack of support for them must be one of the most amazing distortions ever foisted on the American public.

  • The president and other government officials denounce school violence, yet still advocate for endless undeclared wars abroad and easy abortion at home. U.S. drone strikes kill thousands, but nobody in America holds vigils or devotes much news coverage to those victims, many of which are children, albeit, of a different color.

  • Unskilled and inexperienced workers are the ones most often deprived of employment opportunities by increases in the minimum wage.

  • I wish I could say I was shocked at the reports the NSA is secretly spying on the private phone calls of millions of Verizon customers. However, this is a predictable result of a government that continues to erode our liberties while promising some glimmering hope of security.

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

  • We're being taxed to blow up bridges in Iraq and rebuild them, while ours at home are falling down

  • The World's Smallest Political Quiz is responsible for many Americans' first contact with libertarian ideas. While traveling around the country, I have often heard people say, 'I never knew I was a libertarian until I took the Quiz!'

  • I lean toward a flat tax. But I want to make it real flat, like ZERO.

  • Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country and giving it to the rich people of a poor country.

  • The Founders warned that a free society depends on a virtuous and moral people. The current crisis reflects that their concerns were justified.

  • 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.

  • The Fourth Amendment is clear; we should be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, and all warrants must have probable cause. Today the government operates largely in secret, while seeking to know everything about our private lives - without probable cause and without a warrant.

  • 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.

  • What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?

  • By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so called 'diversity' actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist...

  • There is no such thing as a hate crime.

  • Because federal hate-crime laws criminalize thoughts, they are incompatible with a free society.

  • Contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of H.Res. 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.

  • The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.

  • The cost in terms of liberties lost and the unnecessary exposure to terrorism are difficult to determine, but in time it will become apparent to all of us that foreign interventionism is of no benefit to American citizens, but is instead a threat to our liberties.

  • I wouldn't vote against getting rid of the Jim Crow laws.

  • General welfare is a general condition - maybe sound currency is general welfare, maybe markets, maybe judicial system, maybe a national defense, but this is specific welfare. This justifies the whole welfare state - the military industrial complex, the welfare to foreigners, the welfare state that imprisons our people and impoverishes our people and gives us our recession.

  • 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.

  • There's a a right to privacy for all individuals and all who have legal rights - and that includes the unborn. As an obstetrician, if I cause any harm to a fetus, I will be sued. If someone kills or harms a fetus they're liable in a court of law.

  • Income taxes are responsible for the transformation of the Federal government from one of limited powers into a vast leviathan whose tentacles reach into almost every aspect of American life.

  • Banning guns because of their misuse is like banning the First Amendment because one might libel or slander.

  • We have depended on government for so much for so long that we as people have become less vigilant of our liberties. As long as the government provides largesse for the majority, the special interest lobbyists will succeed in continuing the redistribution of welfare programs that occupies most of Congress's legislative time.

  • We need to make sure that people can save all the money they spend on medical care by getting it back from their taxes, by reducing their tax burden.

  • I never would force the Justice Department to go to California and arrest people getting medical marijuana, when that's the law there.

  • Why does the U.S. care which flag will be hoisted on a small piece of land thousands of miles away?

  • 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.

  • The sad thing is, our foreign policy WILL change eventually, as Rome's did, when all budgetary and monetary tricks to fund it are exhausted.

  • You can at least let sick people have marijuana because it's helpful. But the compassionate conservatives say, well we can't do this, we're going to put people who are sick and dying with cancer and are being helped with marijuana if they have multiple sclerosis - the federal government is going in there and overriding state laws and putting people like that in prison.

  • 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.

  • Each of us should choose which course of action we must take; education, conventional political action, or even peaceful civil disobedience to bring about necessary changes, but let it not be said that we did nothing.

  • Unlike Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, I never voted to provide taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood.

  • Unfortunately, the greater the humanitarian outreach, the greater the violence required to achieve it.

  • Outsourcing is a reflection of a bad economic environment domestically. If you fix that, you fix outsourcing. Our primary export is paper money, and that should change if you change the monetary policy.

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

  • I grew up in Pittsburgh, where you couldn't even see the noon sun in the sky, and that whole city was cleaned up without the federal government needing to be involved. I think we would have been much better served from the start if people would have better understood the principles of private property.

  • 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.

  • I think the policy makers like the idea of being the boss. I mean people who like to boss other people around like to go into politics so they can become the boss.

  • No matter what politicians promise, Social Security reform will not change the fact that your money is taken from your paycheck and sent to Washington, where it will be spent.

  • I think Israel should be treated as an independent nation and not a puppet of our state.

  • Is it any more moral to dilute the value of the purchasing power of the money you hold in your wallet than it is for the farmer to dilute the milk supply with water?

  • It is not democracy to send in billions of dollars to push regime change overseas. It isn't democracy to send in the NGOs to re-write laws and the constitution in places like Ukraine. It is none of our business.

  • It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.

  • We should respect each other as rational beings by trying to achieve our goals through reason and persuasion rather than threats and coercion.

  • If you ever can bring about revolutionary changes, two things would be required: young people would have to be involved and you would need music.

  • I have some help on tweeting.

  • For the same reason a disease cannot be cured by more of the germ that caused it, the inflation and debt accumulation of the Obama years will not inflate our way out of it.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share