Alan Keyes Quotations

Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.

When we, through our educational culture, through the media, through the entertainment culture, give our children the impression that human beings cannot control their passions, we are telling them, in effect, that human beings cannot be trusted with freedom.

The flag that was the symbol of slavery on the high seas for a long time was not the Confederate battle flag, it was sadly the Stars and Stripes.

Our first responsibility is not to ourselves. Our first responsibility is to our country and to our God.

The income tax is a twentieth-century socialist experiment that has failed. Before the income tax was imposed on us just 80 years ago, government had no claim to our income. Only sales, excise, and tariff taxes were allowed.

We must take away the government's credit card. With limits on both tax revenue and borrowing, the Federal government would finally be forced to get serious about spending cuts

It's about time we all faced up to the truth. If we accept the radical homosexual agenda, be it in the military or in marriage or in other areas of our lives, we are utterly destroying the concept of family.

I frankly don't care if you agree with my stand on abortion. I take that stand because no other stand is consistent with decent principles, and no other standard is consistent with the will of God.

Christ would not vote for Barack Obama, because Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved.

I don't think that has to be our choice... This party was born in principle. This party will die if it doesn't stand by its decision of principle.

We need to get rid of the 16th amendment, and return to the original system that funds government with a variety of tariffs and duties.

One individual doesn't really accept the pro-life position of the party, and the other ... says he supports it and takes a position that is logically inconsistent.

Would you join me in repudiating that kind of racial slur, to apologize?

The money we spend on education should follow the choice of the parents, not the choice of educrats, bureaucrats, politicians, who, unfortunately, have been manipulating this process in their own career interests, not in the interests of our young people.

The act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember that our whole way of life is predicated on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well.

If we accept the logic of the Declaration, reverence for God is not just a matter of religious faith, it is the foundation of justice and citizenship in our republic.

Our founders understood that divine authority was necessary in order to establish a ground on which the weak, the defenseless, the powerless, the poor and the wretched would be able to stand, in the face of every human power whatsoever, and demand respect for their human rights and dignity.

A conservative party that reshapes its self-presentation according to the suggestions of the liberal media, of course, may very well get what such lack of courage deserves. Having been told by their opponents for years that the key to Republican victory was a softening of the message and more smiles, Republicans have now apparently taken a big dose of this medicine. One might counsel more caution in accepting medicine from one's enemies.

Sex itself only exists in relation to procreation. That's one of the reasons why I sometimes object - and it's just a theoretical objection, but it's worth thinking about - to the whole notion that one calls what people of the same sex do "sexual relations." As a matter of fact, they have precisely turned their back on sexual relations, in order to engage in acts of mutual pleasure that have nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality.

The idea of a terrorist attack that assaults innocent human beings in a building or a mall or a restaurant is bad enough. Yet the terrorist mind that looks at a passenger plane and sees the fuel and the intensity of the blast, and sees the rocket engines that will carry it into the heart of destruction like a cruise missile, but who does not see the humanity of one single soul on that airplane, is the chilling truth of what we're up against.

Black Americans make up 10 or 11% of the population, but they account now for something of 40 to 45% of all the abortions. This is a privileged position that I'm not sure anyone in their right mind would aspire to.

We must reject dictatorship in whatever form it takes--and especially when it rears its head in our own midst on the bench.

The Assault Weapons Ban deals with a fictional distinction. You have guns that are exactly the same guns as are banned, in function, that were banned because of the way they look. And you know, that's the whole truth of this policy: it's to make politicians look as if they are doing something, when in point of fact, they are doing nothing.

When we surrender moral government to the courts, we have surrendered the very essence of freedom, we have surrendered its only real meaning--and we will not be free again until we get it back.

The person you call 'President Obama" and I frankly refuse to call him that... at the moment, he is somebody who is kind of an 'alleged usurper' who is alleged to be someone who is occupying that office without constitutional warrant to do so.

From the time of the Revolutionary War, when citizens stood forward to defend their liberties against the depredations of tyranny, all the way through Civil War, through the great World Wars, this nation has been defended by the tradition of common ordinary folks who come from behind the plow, come from the store-clerking, come from the classrooms to get on the battlefields - ordinary citizens turned into heroes in defense of their liberty, because that's the potential of freedom.

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.

I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton's willingness to go into a state she doesn't even live in and pretend to represent the people there. So I certainly wouldn't imitate it.

Preferential affirmative action patronizes American blacks, women, and others by presuming that they cannot succeed on their own. Preferential affirmative action does not advance civil rights in this country.

The travesty of slavery wasn't physical abuse. It was the moral abuse of looking at a human being as if they are an animal.

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.

Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description - an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations.

Christians belong in American politics because there is not and cannot be a fundamental separation between our moral vocation and our citizenship.

It is the absence of bars that makes a beast free - but only the truth can make a man free.

I accept the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, to represent the State of Illinois.

I read American sagas (of the west) and I do not see people who went in search of material things. I see people who wrote down that what they sought was an escape from an old world which dictated their conscience and established their merit based on who their parents.

A nation of character is filled with citizens who gradually build lives based on the living awareness that their deeds are judged by eyes of unchanging truth, by a will that is the real measure of what is right, and therefore of what is good.

Where do find the most persecuted Christians in the world?... in the classrooms of our government schools, where the assault is not upon the body, but the soul.

I personally do not owe the debt that was owed by the campaign.

Without the basis in written law, and without the basis in our Constitution ratified by the people, judges can't make laws. And if we accept the notion that their dictates are law, then we have not only submitted to tyranny, we have abandoned a republican form of government.

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

Christ would not vote for Barack Obama because Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved,

Increasingly, I wonder if there are any outrages that would be sufficiently ominous in their effects upon liberty and unequivocal in their moral perversity to awaken the American people to the tyrannical spirit that envelopes the Clinton White House.

We must teach our children that the preservation of liberty, and of an order of society conducive to human dignity, requires that a free people retain the moral and material means to discipline its own government, should the temptation to tyranny take root.

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.

Rights come from God and only from God.

That money was for working eight to twelve hour days ... it was not a welfare check.

In its proper constitutional sense, the term [militia] means all the able-bodied people who can be trained and disciplined to act in the community’s defence when it’s attacked. Since it encompasses every able-bodied person, it does not refer to those—such as the police, the military, or even the National Guard—who formally compose the official defence forces of the nation. Every citizen able and willing to act in an emergency becomes a potential defender against attacks aimed at the general population.

In this respect, granting homosexuals the right to marry is like granting plantation owners the right to own slaves.

If the Declaration of Independence states our creed, there can be no right to abortion, since it means denying the most fundamental right of all to the unborn child, the right to life.

Our success or failure is not in the hands of our leaders. It is in our hands.

The Declaration of Independence summarizes the civic principles of American life. It agrees with this biblical perspective when it affirms that we are all created equal and endowed by the Creator, God, with our unalienable rights.

Our leaders will serve the common good with better laws and better actions only when we serve it first, by casting better votes.

And when you tell me that somebody's skin color or gender is going to determine their prospects in this world, that is turning the clock back hundreds of years. Back to a time before this nation declared that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator; not by their ancestry, not by their skin color, not by their gender, not by Congress, not by the Constitution, and not by the laws

Harden our hearts to the innocents in the womb, and we have hardened our hearts to the need for compassion, and mercy, and fellow-feeling, and charity, and decency in this world.

The question isn't whether you have a good master or a bad master. It's to be your own master. That is the dignity of humanity.

The heart of government, coated with whatever velvet gloves you want to put on it, is a mailed fist of force and coercion.

Rights don't come from human documents. The very idea is only worthy of contempt. Human documents are nothing but pieces of paper, they are nothing but words--until by will, and conscience, and courage, and commitment, human beings turn them into reality.

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.

It is not for us to calculate our victory or fear our defeat, but to do our duty and leave the rest in God's hands.

Family life is the normal context in which we can learn that a life filled with thinking about others instead of ourselves is the sure road to the most fulfilling joys and satisfactions.

That is one of the reasons I oppose this whole Affirmative Action business. We are not supposed to be judged based on what our ancestors did or suffered. We are supposed to be judged as individuals, based on what we are able to achieve.

There is a difference between constitutional government and judicial dictatorship. And I think it's time we remembered that our Constitution was not put together in order to establish the sovereignty of the judges, it was framed in order to guarantee the sovereignty of the people.

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

The gospel of licentiousness, of selfishness, of blaming all the difficulties of life on external factors - these are the things that are killing people today in ways that the slave whips and the overseers couldn't.

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.

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.

At the root of the assault on our liberties is, in fact, an assault on our character--an assault that assumes that we are not good enough to be free, and that aims to make sure that we are no longer strong enough, courageous enough, disciplined enough to be a free people.

I will stand against those who see terrorism when Americans die, but who see suicide bombers who kill Israelis and believe that that is just part of the negotiating process.

A callous disregard for the claims of innocent human life is the heart and soul of the evil of terrorism.

God's irony: that in order to fight and defeat the threat of terrorism, we shall have to be clear about the principle of justice that allows us to understand what is evil in terrorism. And that principle of justice is the claim of justice that is inherent in every innocent human life. But if that claim was there in the Twin Towers, if it was there on the airplanes that those terrorists attacked, you explain to me why it is not there in the womb!

It's like the neighborhood I would have grown up in, I think, if I had have grown up here.

I feel like we're between two great possibilities: we're either going to turn things around, and in this generation see the rising sun of a new moral dedication in America, or we're going to lose the struggle for that moral renewal, throw away the basic principles on which our life and civilization is based, and head toward a new century that will make the 20th century look like a dress rehearsal for evil.

[T]he great American statesman devotes his energy, ability, and wisdom to conforming himself and this people to the moral principles that gave this nation birth, are older than anything else in the country's soul, and yet retain the power to make us young again with the vigor of virtue and the zeal for justice.

I want to see my party achieve victory based on what we have to offer this country and our ability to offer it with integrity. I don't want to see us achieve victory based on the fact that we are better at rigging the game than other people.

We may well soon be subjected to anything that judges want to enforce.... The result will be an enforced inability of the states to pass laws that reflect the principled judgment of their own citizens....And as our Founders taught us so well, ...[that] will be the end of liberty and the establishment of tyranny in America.

We have created an educational system, funded throughout the country by taxpayer dollars, that systematically turns our children away from the truth that makes them free.

Nothing is so opportune for tyrants as a people tired of its liberty.

Politics must be founded on the solid faith of God almighty

When are Christian folks going to remember that every time you call yourself a Christian, you invoke the name of God, and that if you then walk a walk that does not reflect the presence of Christ in your life, cast a vote that does not reflect the presence of Christ in your life, then you are taking the name of the Lord your God in vain?

Every leader, and every regime, and every movement, and every organization that steps across the line to terrorism must be banished from the discourse of civilized human life.

There's not a single thing on offer in this all-too-temporary world for which you should ever sell your soul.

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

The gun control mentality is ruthlessly absurd. It suggests that you pass a law which will bind law-abiding citizens — they won't have access to weapons. Now, we know that criminals, by definition, are people who don't obey laws. Therefore, you can pass all the laws that you want, they will still have access to these weapons, just as they have access to illegal drugs and other things right now. That means you end up with a situation in which the law-abiding folks can't defend themselves, and the crooks have all the guns.

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.

The right response when, in the army, you are given an unlawful order, is to refuse that order. The right response of a chief executive in this state and in this nation, when faced with an order by a court that he conscientiously believes violates the constitution he is sworn to respect, is to refuse their order!

We stand on no high moral plateau in our time. We are, in fact, plumbing depths of depravity unknown to our ancestors--and whatever may have been the evil in which they engaged, at least they were willing to acknowledge the principle by which their evil was condemned. We have even turned our back on the principle.

The First Amendment isn't about free thought and free opinion and free belief. The First Amendment is about free exercise--the carrying into practice of religious principles, and beliefs, and convictions.

The fundamental premise of liberalism is the moral incapacity of the American people.

Anything the government gives you is just another link in the chains that destroy your liberty.

Freedom is first of all a responsibility before the God from whom we come.

Do we really think that a government-dominated education is going to produce citizens capable of dominating their government, as the education of a truly vigilant self-governing people requires?

[Barack] Obama is a radical communist and I think it is becoming clear. That is what I told people in Illinois and now everybody realizes it is coming true. He is going to destroy this country and we are either going to stop him or the United States of America is going to cease to exist.

Christ is the very epitome of innocence, and without the blood of Christ, shed on Calvary, God's plan of salvation would not have been fulfilled.

I wish I could applaud all of you in the media for such fairness, ... But I certainly can't.

If we would let God into our schools under normal circumstances, then we probably wouldn't have to see our children turn to God when faced with this kind of evil,

He refused to take into account the sensitivity of the black people of South Carolina on that flag.

It isn't a free speech issue; it's a matter of public decency.

Our first responsibility is not to ourselves, ... Our first responsibility is to our country and to our God.

I think if G.W. Bush or (John) McCain or anybody like them, if they are the nominees, we're gonna get so badly slaughtered we won't even know what hit us because the American people want to see the issues of character and moral integrity addressed.