President Herbert Hoover -

 When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned. There is no such thing as a no-man’s land between honesty and dishonesty. Our strength lies in spiritual concepts. It lies in public sensitiveness to evil. Our greatest danger is not from invasion by foreign armies. Our dangers are that we may commit suicide from within by complaisance with evil, or by public tolerance of scandalous behavior.

Bryan Caplan -

 But in a strange sense, both gun control and prohibition grow out of softness. A system with the moral courage to harshly, swiftly, and surely punish violence would have little need of gun control. A system with the moral courage to harshly, swiftly, and surely punish abusers for stealing, trespassing, vandalizing, and defiling would have little need of prohibition. In both cases, we haphazardly punish millions of innocents because we refuse to decisively punish thousands of clear-cut criminals.

Thomas Sowell -

 Most people who read the Communist Manifesto have no idea it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nonetheless spoke boldly in the name of the workers.