Here’s a little quiz for ya’ll. h/t to Bones. Guess who wrote each…scroll down for answers at the bottom!
a.) “The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest and ourselves united. From the conclusion of [their] war [for independence, a nation begins] going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of [that] war will remain on [them] long, will be made heavier and heavier, till [their] rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.”
b.) “In the highest antiquity, the people did not know that there were rulers. In the next age they loved them and praised them. In the next they feared them; in the next they despised them.”
c.) “And how we burned in the camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall a half dozen people with axes, hammers pokers or whatever was at hand…”
d.) Violence is the Final Outcome of Government Tyranny
ANSWERS:
a) –Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XVII, 1782
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html
b) – -Lao-Tzu
http://classics.mit.edu/Lao/taote.html
c) – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
d) — Ron Ewart February 11, 2008
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/08/02/11/ewart.html
http://www.citizensforaconstitutionalrepublic.com/Ron_Ewart.html
And BTW, when you get a chance, get over to The Avalon Project site and bookmark it for reference–it’s an awesome site housing documents of Law, History and Diplomacy spanning six thousand years from the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale, New Haven, CT. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/magframe.asp
The Dame Truth 