Harry V. Jaffa Quotes

If the people in this room were not citizens of the United States, if they were not citizens of any state, or of any sovereign government, and if we decided that we needed to, for our own protection, first beginning with safety—September 11th told us why we need each other for the sake of safety—form a government, we have to recognize, each one of us, that this government shall protect the right to life, and to liberty, and property of each one of us. No one of us can say that he deserves protection for the government to be formed, but not somebody else, or that somebody is entitled to more protection than anybody else. Anybody who demands more protection from the government than his fellow citizens won’t be accepted as a fellow citizen.

In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln accomplished something almost miraculous. That is to say, what he had to do was to fight off the challenge of Douglas from the Republican side and at the same time drive a wedge between Douglas and the Southern Democrats. I compared his achievement in that to Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign, where Jackson fought two federal armies, beat them both and kept them close to Washington while he joined Lee before Richmond for the final battle of the seven days. It was a case of technical and strategic cleverness and profundity that is, I think, perhaps almost unrivaled in world history.

Alexander Hamilton Stephens' Constitutional View of the War Between the States, which was and remains probably the best defense of the Confederate cause. It is all about states' rights, and the defense of the minority against the tyranny of the numerical majority, although the "silent minority", the four million slaves, are never counted. It is substantially the book that Calhoun would have written had he been alive to do so. Stephens, who was Vice President of the Confederacy, had also been widely known, north and south, as one of the intellectual luminaries of his time.

Now it's absolutely true, and I agree with Professor DiLorenzo, that the Republican Party could never have been successful without the support of the tariff interests involved. The Free Soil Party and the Liberty Party were anti-slavery parties, which were, you might say, pure in their principles, but they had no chance of being successful on a national basis. It was the addition of the tariff interests that gave the Republicans the ability to carry their anti-slavery program into action. And it’s in that light, I think, that you have to look at the whole question of the tariffs.

Diversity in the service of freedom might be a very good thing. Diversity in the service of slavery might be a very bad thing.

But once we have reached this agreement and we then elect a government and that government functions—and the election for that government is one in which there’s freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, so that it is a legitimate government—then that government commands our obedience. We have no right to reject our duty to obey because we don’t like the result of the election—provided the election is conducted fairly and Constitutional rights are observed.

If a minority, losing an election, can break up the government rather than accept the results of the election, free government is impossible. If the only alternatives to rule by a Constitutional majority, I say, Constitutional majority, a majority formed under the rules of the Constitution with minority rights secured. There were no examples of the Republicans doing anything to prevent the opposition from having freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of association. There was a great deal of interference with those rights in the Southern states. But they lost the election according to their own rights. And Lincoln said that if people can break up the government rather than accept the results of a fairly conducted election, then the only alternatives are anarchy or tyranny. What is to prevent, he said, anyone of the states seceding from any future union?

Now, Lincoln said to Douglas, if you accept that Taney’s opinion that slavery is expressly affirmed in the Constitution is true, then you are under an obligation to give the slave owners the implementation of this right.

George W. Bush has said he wants to change things in Washington. On this President's Day, we find him attempting this change in a most profound way. President Bush is to be commended for his recent Proclamation of National Sanctity of Human Life Day, in which he reminds his fellow citizens of the true principles of free government. But those principles today are usually ignored, or scorned. By taking up the challenge of defending these principles, President Bush aligns himself with the greatest President of our nation's history.

According to many of our political and intellectual elites, both liberal and conservative, the minority in a democracy enjoys only such rights as the majority chooses to bestow upon them. The Bill of Rights in the American Constitution—and similar bills in state Constitutions—are regarded as gifts from the majority to the minority. But the American Constitution, and the state constitutions subordinate to it have, at one time or another, sanctioned both slavery and Jim Crow, by which the bills of rights applied to white Americans were denied to black Americans. But according to the elites, it is not undemocratic for the minority to lose. From this perspective, both slavery and Jim Crow were exercises of democratic majority rule. This is precisely the view of democracy by the Sunnis in Iraq, and is the reason they are fighting the United States.

The equality of mankind is best understood in light of a two-fold inequality. The first is the inequality of mankind and of the subhuman classes of living beings that comprise the order of nature. Dogs and horses, for example, are naturally subservient to human beings. But no human being is naturally subservient to another human being. No human being has a right to rule another without the other's consent. The second is the inequality of man and God. As God's creatures, we owe unconditional obedience to His will. By that very fact however we do not owe such obedience to anyone else. Legitimate political authority—the right of one human being to require obedience of another human being—arises only from consent. The fundamental act of consent is, as the 1780 Massachusetts Bill of Rights states, "a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good." The "certain laws for the common good" have no other purpose but to preserve and protect the rights that each citizen possesses prior to government, rights with which he or she has been "endowed by their Creator." The rights that governments exist to secure are not the gift of government. They originate in God.

It was a terrible war. The idea that the cost of the war is due to Lincoln is simply absurd. It was a terrible war because the country was deeply divided, and the question of the future of the nation, whether or not it would be based upon principles recognized as principles of individual liberty, or whether the idea of one race dominating another race would be accepted as a means for governance. Let me just read one short statement here that might interest you. "Since the Civil War, in which the Southern States were conquered, against all historical logic and sound sense, the American people have been in a condition of political and popular decay. ... The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the embryo of a future truly great America." That has been the position of defenders of the Confederacy from Alexander Stephens through Thomas DiLorenzo. Do you know the man who said that was Adolf Hitler?

The United States is engaged today in a great mission to spread democracy to the Middle East, beginning with Afghanistan, and continuing with Iraq. The inhabitants of Iraq are divided into many groups and factions that hate and distrust each other. The attitude of Sunni and Shia Muslims toward each other resembles that of Catholic and Protestant Christians in the sixteenth century, which persist today in northern Ireland, each regarding the other as heretics. Under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the minority of Sunnis persecuted the majority Shias. It is understandable that the minority Sunnis are today resisting majority rule, while the majority Shia favor it. The Sunnis clearly believe that majority rule by Shia will be used as a means of retribution and revenge. The Sunnis look upon majority rule by the Shia the way the South looked upon the election of Lincoln in 1860. It is inconceivable to the Sunnis that the rule of the Shia majority will be anything other than tyranny. Indeed, it is inconceivable to them that any political power, whether of a minority or a majority, would be non-tyrannical. The idea of non-tyrannical government is alien to their history and their experience. They regard our assertions of Jeffersonian or Lincolnian principles as mere hypocrisy, as they see no other form of rule other than that of force. Our government assumes that the people of the Middle East, like people elsewhere, seek freedom for others no less than for themselves. But that is an assumption that has not yet been confirmed by experience.

There were eight of them that had laws trying to protect black people who were free from being kidnapped as slaves, because under the law of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act. If a Southerner came across from Virginia to Pennsylvania and saw a black man that he thought he would like to have as a slave, he had to say, 'Well, that’s my runaway slave', and this runaway slave would then be arrested and confined, and then there would be a hearing before a federal commissioner. And the would-be slave owner could summon witnesses—as many as he wanted. The man accused of being a slave could summon no witnesses, had no counsel. And if the federal commissioner decided he was a slave, he was paid $10, and if he decided he was a free man, he was paid $5. It’s hard to imagine any law passed in either Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia that was more inconsistent with the principles of civil liberty than the Fugitive Slave Act.

The President's Proclamation is in direct contradiction of the legal positivism reigning in the legal profession, a positivism held no less tenaciously by conservatives than liberals, a positivism that denies all constitutional status to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The contrast between the President's Proclamation and this positivism reveals a profound alienation from the principles of the American Founding among our nation's intellectual elites.