Alan Keyes Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

Freedom does not mean doing what you can get away with, doing what you please. It means, instead, having the opportunity to do what you ought to do—for family and for community and for humanity as a whole.

Alan Keyes
There was a time when most Americans held to the notion that the only sure and secure foundation for freedom was God - the Source of unalienable rights and the Policeman stationed in every human heart... But apparently, we don't believe in that sort of thing anymore.

Alan Keyes
Very simply, if we live in a society in which people are going to abuse their freedom, none of us would be willing to tolerate it for very long.

Alan Keyes
Because people afraid of themselves, afraid of their own abuses, no longer confident in their own goodness, are people who will surrender their freedom in order to avoid the consequences of their wickedness.

Alan Keyes
It's in the private places of the heart that freedom is made or unmade by the discipline we create there.

Alan Keyes
Right now, people say we have a progressive income tax, the rich people may more. It's a lie. Rich people don't pay taxes; they pay lawyers and accountants to help them avoid taxes. Poor people don't have that luxury. And so the working stiffs of America end up bearing the brunt of taxation.

Alan Keyes
The answer to crime is not gun control, it is law enforcement and self-control.

Alan Keyes
You can't build marriage on a foundation of selfish hedonism, because that would be to promise people only roses, and marriage is also thorns.

Alan Keyes
Either you can subscribe to the American creed which says that God endowed us with our rights, or you can subscribe to the abortion creed which says that those rights are the consequences of our mother's will.

Alan Keyes
I think, in fact, that this period of prosperity, far from confirming that we are in good shape, simply gives us the leisure to contemplate the truth. And that truth is disturbing. That truth is dangerous. Because as we look back over the course of this century, a century of horrors, and a century of hope; a century of great tragedies and great achievement—but in the midst of it all, what do we find? We find that time and again America has gone through periods of great testing, times when we could not be saved by our military might, because our military might was precisely what was in question. When we could not be saved by our economic might, because our economic condition was exactly what lay in ruins.

Alan Keyes
There can be no self-government without self-discipline. There can be no self-government without self-control. There can be no liberty unless it is grounded in moral discipline and the ability to do what is right.

Alan Keyes
You can't have it both ways. Either our rights come from God, as our Declaration of Independence says, or they come from human choice. If they come from human choice, then our whole way of life is meaningless, it has no foundation.

Alan Keyes
Well, poor folks wouldn't have to pay taxes because the proposal that I support would include a market basket of goods and services in all the basic areas of necessity and requirements of life that would be exempt from taxation. And that would essentially mean that instead of having to hire fancy accountants and lawyers to figure out how you get all the tax breaks, you know, rich people can do that.

Alan Keyes
I can think of no society that would be uglier in its results than one in which everybody was determined to do whatever they could get away with, and in which no obligations or responsibilities were acknowledged to other human beings, to parents, to children; in which, essentially, we had defined freedom as "do what you please" and "go as far as you think your power will carry you. Despoil and exploit anybody you have to, because as long as you get away with it, no one will stand in your way."

Alan Keyes
Our loss of integrity, therefore, already exposes us to the loss of liberty, already subverts the integrity of the Constitutional system that requires that we act with courage in defense of our liberty.

Alan Keyes
In the great Declaration of our principles, it didn't say that all men are created equal 'if you so choose.' It said that all are created equal by the power and the will of God, and that we must respect their rights as we respect that will.

Alan Keyes
How does it secure the blessings of liberty to our posterity, to those generations yet unborn, to kill them, aborting them in the womb?

Alan Keyes
If you go down a road that satisfies your personal predilections and relationships and sacrifices the common good of the country, including the elementary institution by which its civilization is sustained, then you're not only derelict in your public duty, you are abandoning your obligation as a human being. And frankly, people throw around words like "crime against humanity", I think that kind of disregard for the God-endowed natural rights of human being is the archetype of all crimes against humanity, and I think we have an entire elite faction that is now committed to committing such a crime against the American people.

Alan Keyes
Most of the money collected in the income tax comes from brackets $50,000 and below, from working people. The way in which my proposal helps them is it gives them back control of their money. Until they decide how to spend it, the government doesn't get to tax it, and if they spend it on the basic necessities of life, people who are poor, people who are on fixed incomes and so forth and so on, they wouldn't have to pay taxes, but also other people who are at a time in life where maybe they're saving for the down payment on their house or trying to do something else, they would be able to give themselves tax cuts just by controlling the pattern of their consumption. So, it put everyone—poor and working people—back in control of their own economic life.

Alan Keyes