Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever."

~ Noam Chomsky

"Another perceived attribute of intellectuals that needs rethinking and revision: the assumption that they are deeply and unequivocally committed to personal, political and intellectual freedom and especially free expression…many Western intellectuals’ commitment to intellectual freedom is selective at best."

~ Paul Hollander  

"What we call the freedom of the individual is not just the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a voice which can speak for those who are silent."

~ Stephen Spender

"I am only one, but I am one.
I cannot do everything, but I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
What I can do, I should do.
And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do."

~ Edward Everett Hale  

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble."

~ Helen Keller  

"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

~ William Faulkner  

"The electors see their representative not only as a legislator for the state but also as the natural protector of local interests in the legislature; indeed, they almost seem to think that he has a power of attorney to represent each constituent, and they trust him to be as eager in their private interests as in those of the country."

~ Alexis de Tocqueville  

"... the smaller the domain where choices among alternatives are made collectively, the smaller will be the probability that any individual's preference gets overruled."

~ Anthony de Jasay  

"Liberty requires restraints on popularly-elected leaders, as well as from minorities, so that the individual is protected from undue and arbitrary coercion by the state. These restraints are provided by a plurality of more or less equal and independent groups which check and balance one another's power."

~ William Kornhauser  

"What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others."

~ Aristotle  

"A free man is as jealous of his responsibilities as he is of his liberties."

~ Cyril James  

"Charity begins at home."

~ Publius Terentius Afer  

"Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual … who … can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government."

~ Friedrich Nietzsche  

"The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions."

~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau  

"Once we start to worry too often and too deeply about what certain individuals and what certain groups think about us, then we might start selling our souls for the sake of expediency."

~ Otis Chandler