Freedom / Goverment Quotes
"Freedom cannot always continue in comfort and convenience, cannot be assured without sacrifice, without truth and decency, without willingness to work, without downright honesty and honor, and readiness to keep the commandments and live within the law...there is no liberty without a real respect for law; no liberty if we forget God, or fail to remember the principles on which freedom is founded."
Richard L. Evans
"Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong."
John G. Riefenbaker
"How our governments need standards of integrity! How our communities need yardsticks to measure decency! How our neighborhoods need models of beauty and cleanliness! How our schools need continued encouragement and assistance to maintain high educational standards! Rather than spend time complaining about the direction in which these institutions are going, we need to exert our influence in shaping the right direction. A small effort by a few can result in so much good for all of mankind."
L. Tom Perry
Ensign, May 1988 (April Conference) page 15 - "In the World"
"Freedom can be killed by neglect as well as by direct attack."
Ezra Taft Benson, "Watchman, Warn the Wicked," Ensign, July 1973, 38
"Let the people see to it that they get righteous men to be their leaders, who will labor with their hands and administer to their own necessities, sit in judgment, legislate, and govern in righteousness; and officers that are filled with peace; and see to it that every man that goes forth among the people as a traveling officer is full of the fear of the Lord, and would rather do right at a sacrifice than do wrong for a reward."
"Discourses of Brigham Young", p. 427
"William Penn expressed it best: 'Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.'"
William Penn
President Dwight D. Eisenhower had interesting insight into the importance of spiritual and moral strength.
One evening [he] had a few close friends at the White House in Washington, D.C. They were discussing world problems. For a long while, the President listened; then he said:
"My friends, the biggest, most powerful weapon in the world is not the atomic bomb, or even the fighting ability of men. It is their moral and spiritual strength. Nothing can ever conquer that strength. Remember this, gentlemen, because that is the weapon our enemies really fear."
John Longden, CR, April 1968, p. 138
James Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, wrote this in 1877:
"Now more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature...If the next centennial does not find us a great nation...it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces."
Paul Weyrick, Letter from Free Congress Foundation, 16 Feb. 1999 Quoted in Dr. James Dobson's "Focus on the Family" June 1999 newsletter
"We must become involved in civic affairs. As citizens of this republic we cannot do our duty and be idle spectators."
Ezra Taft Benson (Ensign, November 1987, page 102)
"I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty and profusion and servitude."
Thomas Jefferson
"If the nation is living within its income, its credit is good. If in some crisis it lives beyond its income for a year or two, it can usually borrow temporarily on reasonable terms. But if, like the spendthrift, it throws descretion to the winds, is willing to make no sacrifice at all in spending, extends its taxing up to the limit of the people's power to pay, and continues to pile up deficits, it is on the road to bankruptcy."
Franklin D. Roosevelt
"If the world learned from history, how different both would be."
Arnold Glasow
"It must be the aim of education to teach the citizen that he must first of all rule himself."
Winthrop A. Aldrich
"One of the things the news media does very well is to make a minority look like a majority."
Author unknown
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars." (Durant, p. 665.)
Spencer W. Kimball, "Home: The Place to Save Society," Ensign, Jan. 1975, 3
"America is great because she is good and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great."
Alexis De Tocqueville, 1835
"People must be changed...goodness cannot be legislated."
Spencer W. Kimball
"We need to add to the three R's, namely Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic, a fourth——- RESPONSIBILITY."
President Herbert Hoover
"We shall continue to have crime until our neighbor's problems are as important to us as they are to him."
Voltaire
"Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong."
Daniel O'Connell