“Life, Liberty, Property, the Pursuit of Happiness: These are the rights our government was created to protect. When the government confiscates your property to subsidize someone else’s choices, it has gone from protecting your rights to violating them - in the name of giving others what they have not earned. Whether that unearned benefit takes the form of education, health care, Social Security, mortgage assistance or anything else some bureaucrat decides is in the “public interest,” the government’s message is the same: “You earn it, we’ll spend it – your values, rights, and life be damned.”

“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government...”

“Americans today sometimes assume the Founders' references to God or Nature or the Supreme Ruler were just for impact or for propaganda. Not so. These were tightly reasoned statements of legal principles. Your rights to your life, liberty, and property came from your Creator, not the government; these rights cannot be repealed.”

“..."extreme capitalism": the obsessive, uncritical penetration of the concept of the market into every aspect of American life, and the attempt to drive out every other institution, including law, art, culture, public education, Social Security, unions, community, you name it. It is the conflation of markets with populism, with democracy, with diversity, with liberty, and with choice---and so the denial of any form of choice that imposes limits on the market. More than that, it is the elimination of these separate concepts from our political discourse, so that we find ourselves looking to the stock market to fund retirement, college education, health care, and having forgotten that in other wealthy and developed societies these are rights, not the contingent outcomes of speculative games.James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, University of Texas.”

“Surely, if it is the right of the people to "alter or abolish," it is their right to criticize, even severely, policies they believe destructive of the ends for which government has been established. This principle, in the Declaration of Independence, suggests that true patriotism lies in supporting the values the country is supposed to cherish: equality, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. When our government compromises, undermines, or attacks those values, it is being unpatriotic.”

“Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”