Ron Paul Quotes

Prohibiting guns on campus made the Virginia Tech students less safe, not more.

Everyone assumes America must play the leading role in crafting some settlement or compromise between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington explicitly warned against involving ourselves in foreign conflicts.

Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons.

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.

I lean toward a flat tax. But I want to make it real flat, like ZERO.

If I were in Congress in 1996, I would have voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which used Congress's constitutional authority to define what official state documents other states have to recognize under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, to ensure that no state would be forced to recognize a 'same sex' marriage license issued in another state.

If you drink too much, you go out and you harm to somebody, you have to suffer the consequences. Same way with health matters. You don't have the right to demand that someone else take care of you because of your habits.

I take my marching orders from the Constitution.

Suicide terrorism stops when we stop intervening abroad.

This much is true: you have been lied to.

I had the privilege of practicing medicine in the early '60s, before we had any government. It worked rather well, and there was nobody on the street suffering with no medical care.

The American people are sick and tired of Washington and the people who have been in charge have been passing all these bills and I've been voting no all of the time and vote no on these appropriation bills.

I have never been one who is comfortable talking about my faith in the political arena. In fact, the pandering that typically occurs in the election season I find to be distasteful. But for those who have asked, I freely confess that Jesus Christ is my personal Savior, and that I seek His guidance in all that I do.

You have to remember, rights don't come in groups we shouldn't have 'gay rights'; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn't have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group.

Americans are tired of the games and the lies of today's media. They want the truth. Imagine this. No censors, no barricades, no statists. We will be able to engage viewers directly on subjects that matter most to them, from finances to civil liberties to foreign policy.

A citizen walking through the airport today is bombarded with 1984-style propaganda messages that are designed to make us fear some amorphous threat and also be suspicious of others. The government designs these messages to make us feel dependent and heavily lorded over in every aspect of our lives. These messages are becoming ever more pervasive, hitting us even in grocery stores when we are shopping.

America's heart and soul is more embedded in our love of liberty, self-reliance, and tolerance than by our foreign policy, driven by powerful special interests with little regard for the Constitution.

Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it's wrong.

Speak up, speak often and don’t worry about those that at this point cannot understand as they can never un-hear what we tell them.

Prices are going up. Unemployment is continue to go up. And we have not had the necessary correction for the financial bubble created by our Federal Reserve system.

American voters should understand that Congress will always find a way to spend every last dollar sent to Washington.

Back a hundred years ago, especially around Woodrow Wilson, what happened in this country is we took freedom and we chopped it into pieces.

If you care about your personal liberty, you'll be cautious when you feel comfortable, blame all the illegal immigrants for everything. What you need to do is attack their benefits: no free education, no free subsidies, no citizenship, no birth-right citizenship.

In wartime, people willing to sacrifice liberty for security.

The law cannot make a wicked person virtuous…God’s grace alone can accomplish such a thing.

American voters should understand that Congress will always find a way to spend every last dollar sent to Washington. Remember, politicians get votes by promising everything to everyone, always at the expense of some other invisible taxpayers. ...The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard.

There's been a coup, have you heard? It's the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military. They're the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries. ... And of course the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve. ... And yet think of the harm they have done since they were established [after] World War II. They are a government unto themselves. They're in businesses, in drug businesses, they take out dictators ... We need to take out the CIA.

The number one responsibility for each of us is to change ourselves with hope that others will follow.

I believe that when we overdo our military aggressiveness, what it does it actually weakens our national defense. I mean, we stood up to the Soviets. They had 40,000 nuclear weapons. Now we're fretting day in and day - night about third-world countries that have no army, navy or air force.

Congress remains in total denial as our liberties are rapidly fading before our eyes. The process is propelled by unwarranted fear and ignorance as to the true meaning of liberty. It is driven by economic myths, fallacies and irrational good intentions.

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.

We must remember, elections are short-term efforts. Revolutions are long-term projects.

Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language.

I see this piece of legislation as essentially being a declaration of virtual war. It is giving the President tremendous powers to pursue war efforts against a sovereign nation. ...I think it is another example of a flawed foreign policy that we have followed for a good many decades.

Think of what happened after 9/11, the minute before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq, and so the war drums beat.

No single person, including the President of the United States, should ever be given the power to make a medical decision for potentially millions of Americans. Freedom over one's physical person is the most basic freedom of all, and people in a free society should be sovereign over their own bodies. When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.

Truth is treason in the empire of lies.

It is true that liberty is not free, nor is it easy. But tyranny - even varying degrees of it - is much more difficult, and much more expensive. The time has come to rein in the federal government, put it on a crash diet, and let the people keep their money and their liberty.

In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.

The role of the federal government is to protect our liberties. That means they should protect our religious liberties to do what we want; our intellectual liberty, but it also should protect our right to do to our body what we want, you know, what we take into our bodies.

In the free society envisioned by the founders, schools are held accountable to parents, not federal bureaucrats.

It is a dangerous notion that we need a government to protect us from ourselves.

[Political] conventions lend themselves to pandering, as few politicians can resist the temptation to tell a national television audience how well they will run the country if elected. The problem is that government is not supposed to run the country - we're supposed to be free.

When the federal government spends more each year than it collects in tax revenues, it has three choices: It can raise taxes, print money, or borrow money. While these actions may benefit politicians, all three options are bad for average Americans.

Welfarism and excessive spending and deficits and socialism divide us, because everybody has to go to Washington. Those who have the biggest clout, whose who are the best lobbyists, those who go and they grab. And whether it's the medical industrial complex, or the banking industry, or the military industrial complex, that's who ends up controlling our government...

If we stuck to the Constitution as written, we would have: no federal meddling in our schools; no Federal Reserve; no U.S. membership in the UN; no gun control; and no foreign aid. We would have no welfare for big corporations, or the "poor"; no American troops in 100 foreign countries; no NAFTA, GAT, or "fast-track"; no arrogant federal judges usurping states rights; no attacks on private property; no income tax. We could get rid of most of the agencies, and most of the budget. The government would be small, frugal, and limited.

America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.

Expect the rapidly expanding homeschooling movement to play a significant role in the revolutionary reforms needed to build a free society with Constitutional protections.