I wasn’t religious or political until I bought a gun. Being treated as a presumptive criminal led me to the religion of liberty. Teaching mathematics led me back out of it.

We’ve reached the point where it’s no longer possible, even in theory, to write a law that simply means what it says. And therefore it’s no longer possible for a citizen to be able to know what a law says just by reading it.

For someone to whom ‘the constitution’ means the oral constitution – which is most people, and nearly every government official – the argument that this bill is unconstitutional is the same, in terms of persuasive power, as the argument that I don’t like this bill.

Checks that were supposed to work against oppressive government from the outside — the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box — have become supports that prop up oppressive government from the inside.