Ron Paul - People Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

View all Ron Paul Quotes
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. Nothing would please the terrorists more than if we willingly give up some of our cherished liberties while defending ourselves from their threat.

Ron Paul
People should not be able to vote to take away the rights of others.

Ron Paul
Young people are not raw material to be employed by the political class on behalf of whatever fashionable political, military, or social cause catches its fancy. In a free society, their lives are not the playthings of government.

Ron Paul
We go about the world, fighting to spread democracy and tell them how to live, but we really don't have a democratic system... The laws have been made to make it very difficult, because the Republicans and the Democrats aren't looking for the competition, they want to monopolize it. So in many ways, we are less democratic than some other systems, where they have multiple parties, and more people represented than they're able to be represented here.

Ron Paul
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.

Ron Paul
And yet even among the friends of liberty, many people are deceived into believing that government can make them safe from all harm, provide fairly distributed economic security, and improve individual moral behavior. If the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to achieve these goals, history shows that power is always abused. Every single time.

Ron Paul
In a free-market economy, the consumer is king: labor unions don't run things, business people don't run things, bankers don't run things, politicians don't run things, but the success of a business depends on how people spend their money.

Ron Paul
Though many will criticize the president for mis-steps in Iraq and at home, it is with the complicity of Congress that we have become a nation of pre-emptive war, secret military tribunals, torture, rejection of habeas corpus, warrantless searches, undue government secrecy, extraordinary renditions, and uncontrolled spying on the American people. Fighting over there has nothing to do with preserving freedoms here at home. More likely the opposite is true.

Ron Paul
Howard Fineman: The people who don't pay their taxes on principle are heroic people, in the manner of Gandhi and Martin Luther King?
Ron Paul: I think if they're defending the constitution and they know what they're doing, and this money is supporting some real evil in the world. Preemptive war? That's pretty evil as far as I'm concerned. And so much waste in a system of government that has just overrun our liberties? Yes, I think that in many ways it's heroic for people willing to risk their freedom in order to defend what they believe is freedom.

Ron Paul
Clearly, language threatening to wipe a nation or a group of people off the map is to be condemned by all civilized people. And I do condemn any such language. But why does threatening Iran with a pre-emptive nuclear strike, as many here have done, not also deserve the same kind of condemnation? Does anyone believe that dropping nuclear weapons on Iran will not wipe a people off the map? When it is said that nothing, including a nuclear strike, is off the table on Iran, are those who say it not also threatening genocide? And we wonder why the rest of the world accuses us of behaving hypocritically, of telling the rest of the world do as we say, not as we do.

Ron Paul
War is not popular. It may seem popular in the short run, when there appears to be an immediate victory and everyone is gloating but war is not popular. War is not popular. People get killed, and body bags end up coming back. War is very unpopular, and it is not the politically smart thing to do.

Ron Paul
It's a mistake to think that poor people get the benefit from the welfare system. It's a total fraud. Most welfare go to the rich of this country: the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the foreign dictators, it's totally out of control. [...] This idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept.

Ron Paul
It's amazing that people don't understand that the more the market is involved and the smaller the government, the lower the price, the better the distribution, and the higher the quality.

Ron Paul
Paul: I didn't write them, I disavow them...
Q: So you read them, but didn't do anything.
Paul: I never read that stuff. I was probably aware of it ten years after it was written... it's going on twenty years that people have pestered me about this.
Q: Well, wouldn't you say it's a legitimate question?
Paul: When you get the answer, it's legitimate that you sorta take the answer I give. You know what the answer is? "I didn't write them, I didn't read them at the time, and I disavow them."

Ron Paul
... why the American people would even give the slightest consideration for government health programs. They don't want the government to deliver their automobiles, or their videocassette recorders, or their food... The best way to deliver healthcare is the way we deliver all goods and services in a free society.

Ron Paul
Laura Knoy: Now how does this noninterventionist philosophy play out when it's a humanitarian crisis like genocide in Darfur, Sudan?
Ron Paul:... it should be done voluntarily. I have no right – no moral right or constitutional right – to come with a gun and tax the people and say: "I will take money because I want to do good" … there's warring factions going on there, it's a civil war... You could've argued that in Somalia as well … And the American people are generous – there's no reason why we can't help feed the world, and we do. But there's no justification to use violence against our people to extract money to do good overseas.

Ron Paul
We have a lot of goodness in this country. And we should promote it, but never through the barrel of a gun. We should do it by setting good standards, motivating people and have them want to emulate us. But you can't enforce our goodness, like the neocons preach, with an armed force. It doesn't work.

Ron Paul
Question: If you could pick one cause that has gotten us here, what'd you say it is?
Ron Paul: Easy money. The Federal Reserve artificially lowering interest rates, deceiving the people, the investors, the savers, into believing that there's a lot of savings out there, and that we should invest more, build more houses, more cars. It's the malinvestment, which is every bit as dangerous, from the inflation of the money supply, as is the high prices that usually come.

Ron Paul
We quadrupled the TSA, you know, and hired more people who look more suspicious to me than most Americans who are getting checked. Most of them, they just don't look very American to me. If I'd have been looking, they look suspicious.… I mean, a lot of them can't even speak English, hardly. Not that I'm accusing them of anything, but it's sort of ironic.

Ron Paul
The do-good liberal who said we have to take care of everybody — and they are well intentioned — the more debt they run up to give to the poor, the poorer the people get because they cannot keep up.

Ron Paul
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.

Ron Paul
But no, I just don't think with the scientific evidence now — I think I read an article yesterday on the death penalty, and 68 percent of the time they make mistakes. And it's so racist, too. I think more than half the people getting the death penalty are poor blacks. This is the one place, the one remnant of racism in our country is in the court system, enforcing the drug laws and enforcing the death penalty. I don't even know, but I wonder how many of those, how many have been executed? Over 200, I wonder how many were minorities? You know, if you're rich, you usually don't meet the death penalty.

Ron Paul
Aaron Russo: Is there a law that requires people to file a 1040?
Ron Paul: Not explicitly, but it's certainly implied.
Aaron Russo: Well, implied by force?
Ron Paul: Yeah.
Aaron Russo: But is there a law?
Ron Paul: I can't cite a law, no. But, you know, if they think it's the law, and they have all the guns, it's an authoritarian approach.

Ron Paul
It is not we non-interventionists who are isolationists. The real isolationists are those who impose sanctions and embargoes on countries and peoples across the globe because they disagree with the internal and foreign policies of their leaders. The real isolationists are those who choose to use force overseas to promote democracy, rather than seek change through diplomacy, engagement, and by setting a positive example.

Ron Paul
Legal issues aside, the American people and government should never abide the use of torture by our military or intelligence agencies. A decent society never accepts or justifies torture. It dehumanizes both torturer and victim, yet seldom produces reliable intelligence. Torture by rogue American troops or agents puts all Americans at risk, especially our rank-and-file soldiers stationed in dozens of dangerous places around the globe. God forbid terrorists take American soldiers or travelers hostage and torture them as some kind of sick retaliation for Abu Gharib.

Ron Paul
Certainly the Patriot Act would have never been passed, because it wasn't available to us... It was almost 400 pages long, and became available less than an hour before it was debated on the House floor... The congressmembers were intimidated, "if I do nothing, my people gonna be mad, because they want us to do something". And the people are frightened. When they are frightened, they are much more willing to give us their liberties. But giving up their liberties won't make them safer, that's the real sad part of it.

Ron Paul
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.

Ron Paul