Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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Who are the militia, if they be not the people of this country...? I ask, who are the militia?  They consist of now of the whole people, except a few public officers.
-- George Mason		 
That the people have a Right to mass and to bear arms; that a well regulated militia composed of the Body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper natural and safe defense of a free State...
-- George Mason		 
Considering the natural lust for power so inherent in man, I fear the thirst of power will prevail to oppress the people.
-- George Mason		 
[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia.
-- George Mason		 
A frequent recurrence to the fundamental principles of the constitution, and a constant adherence to those of piety, justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the advantages of liberty, and to maintain a free government.
-- Massachusetts Bill of Rights		 
The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state; it ought not, therefore, to be restricted in this commonwealth.
-- Massachusetts Declaration of Rights		 
Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem (By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty)
-- Massachusetts State Motto		 
One of the things that really bothers me is that Americans don't have any sense of history. The majority of Americans don't have any idea of where we've come from, so they naturally succumb to the kind of cliche version that Ronald Reagan represented.
-- Robert K. Massie		 
Somebody recently figured out that we have 35 million laws to enforce the ten commandments.
-- Bert Masterson		 
Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money?
-- Matthew 20:15		 
The issue of this campaign -- it IS that word socialism. Some people like it. Younger people like it. Those of us like me, who grew up in a cold war and saw some aspects of it while visiting places like Vietnam, like I have, and seeing countries like Cuba, being there. I’m seeing what socialism’s like. I don’t like it. OK? It’s not only not free. It doesn’t freakin’ work!
-- Chris Matthews		 
Power corrupts. But it does more than that. Power attracts the corrupt, then corrupts them further.
-- Don Matthews		 
In 1950, the average family of four paid 2% of its earnings to federal taxes. Today it pays 24%.
-- William R. Mattox, Jr.		 
You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
-- W. Somerset Maugham		 
There are two good things in life -- freedom of thought and freedom of action.
-- W. Somerset Maugham		 
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too.
-- W. Somerset Maugham		 
It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
-- W. Somerset Maugham		 
The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.
-- Francois Mauriac		 
In literature as in love, we are astonished by what is chosen by others.
-- Andre Maurois		 
Human freedom involves the capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.
-- Rollo May		 
No taxation without representation.
-- Jonathan Mayhew		 
To say that subjects in general are not proper judges (of the law) when their governors oppress them and play the tyrant, and when they defend their rights ...is as great a treason as ever a man uttered... (more)
-- Jonathan Mayhew		 
We, today, stand on the shoulders of our predecessors who have gone before us. We, as their successors, must catch the torch of freedom and liberty passed on to us by our ancestors. We cannot lose this battle.
-- Benjamin E. Mays		 
Liberty, understood by materialists as the right to do or not to do anything not directly injurious to others, we understand as the faculty of choosing, among the various modes of fulfilling duty, those most in harmony with our own tendencies.
-- Giuseppe Mazzini		 
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument.
-- William Gibbs McAdoo		 
The fact is that there is a serious danger of this country becoming a pluto-democracy; that is, a sham republic with the real government in the hands of a small clique of enormously wealthy men, who speak through their money, and whose influence, even today, radiates to every corner of the United States.
-- William Gibbs McAdoo		 
In every declining civilization there is a small "remnant" of people who adhere to the right against the wrong; who recognize the difference between good and evil and who will take an active stand for the former and against the latter; who can still think and discern and who will courageously take a stand against the political, social, moral, and spiritual rot or decay of their day.
-- Donald S. McAlvaney		 
Switzerland, on the other hand, insists that every male of military age must keep a powerful, fully automatic assault rifle in his home. Every home must be armed -- by law -- and some even keep mortars. Yet Switzerland has one of the most law-abiding citizenry, the lowest crime rate, and least violence of any country in the free world. And it has remained free for over a thousand years. Compare it to New York and Washington where handguns are completely banned. In fact, in Washington, Chief of Police Maurice Turner recently said that the District of Columbia gun ban law had completely failed, and he has called for armed citizen's police auxiliary to help restore order.
-- Donald S. McAlvaney		 
Thus perhaps the most dangerous of all socialist attacks on America in the 1990s is the onslaught to register and confiscate America's firearms. America cannot be subjugated to communism or a socialist dictatorship until Americans are first disarmed. Poland has strict gun control; so does Cambodia, Russia, and Red China. Over 100 million people were brutally slaughtered in those countries, but first they were disarmed. The danger to people when they can't own guns is far greater than any danger gun ownership can ever create.
-- Donald S. McAlvaney		 
The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.
-- Barry McCaffrey		 
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
-- Eugene McCarthy		 
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.
-- Eugene McCarthy		 
There is danger in the concentration of control in the television and radio networks, especially in the large television and radio stations; danger in the concentration of ownership in the press…and danger in the increasing concentration of selection by book publishers and reviewers and by the producers of radio and television programs.
-- Eugene McCarthy		 
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.
-- Eugene McCarthy		 
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
-- Mary McCarthy		 
The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers … is absurd.
-- Robert McChesney		 
Former ABC News reporter/anchor Sam Donaldson is ready to say the last rites for network news because it will soon lose its dominant position as Americans' primary source of news. 'I think it's dead. Sorry,' he said during a breakfast panel Tuesday at the National Association of Broadcasters' convention in Las Vegas.
-- Bill McConnell		 
If, as it appears, the experiment that was called 'America' is at an end ... then perhaps a fitting epitaph would be ... 'here lies America the greatest nation that might have been had it not been for the Edomite bankers who first stole their money, used their stolen money to buy their politicians and press and lastly deprived them of their constitutional freedom by the most evil device yet created --- The Federal Reserve Banking System.'
-- G. D. McDaniel		 
The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control. … Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.
-- Larry P. McDonald		 
The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and communism under the same tent, all under their control... Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.
-- Larry P. McDonald		 
Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish.
-- Neil A. McDonald		 
Freedom is not a fixed and possessed thing. It is a quality of life. And like action itself, it is something experienced only by individuals.
-- Neil A. McDonald		 
Now the truth of the matter is, there is nothing wrong with this country. Please. The message I want to leave with you is that there's nothing wrong with this country that the proper leadership won't cure. We've been here before. In 1787, the economy of our nation was in absolute chaos and as a consequence, they met in Philadelphia to form a new country, and when they did, they did the right things, and in the second State of the Union address, which was written at that time by George Washington, he said the foundations, the economic foundations of our nation are on such sound footing that it would have been a madman would have suspected 3 years ago. The fact is that the chaos that they're creating doesn't mean that America can or has to be in decline. It means that we need to remove them as rapidly as possible and get people that know what to do and America will continue to climb.
-- Bob McEwen		 
In the 1950’s [America was] the richest nation, the richest city on earth was Detroit. They voted for change and so now it is the poorest city in America. At the same time, the nation of South Korea, of all the nations on earth, was third from the bottom. Virtually the poorest nation on earth. It is now tenth from the top. If you understand the principle, the greater freedom, the greater the wealth, you can then put any nation [on this chart]. Now you can go to Tagusagopos, you can go to Buenos Aires, you can go to Cairo, you can go to Philadelphia and all you need to know is what percentage of the Gross Domestic Product is controlled by government, and the greater the government, the greater the poverty, and that’s all politics is about. Every day politicians say, “I can make a better decision for you than you can for yourself, and let me take your money away from you and make it on your behalf” and thus make the nation poorer.
-- Bob McEwen		 
Now the last time the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the Presidency for four years, was under Jimmy Carter, and so what happened? Exactly the same. That is, we’re all going to run out of this or that or the other thing. We’re all going to run out, we had gas lines, we’re all going to freeze to death. He had his little sweater on and said you had to wear your sweater to ride your bicycle and turn your thermostat down because America’s coming to an end next Tuesday, a week, and there isn’t anything anybody can do about it. Those folks don’t know how to run anything. So therefore, and the night before the election in which Ronald Reagan went on television and said, “There’s nothing wrong with America that the proper leadership won’t cure.” Now the first thing that they did was to take all of those crazy regulations from the oil industry and throw them in the Potomac, and in 24 hours, in 24 hours gas stations that had been closed night after night, for year after year, when I drove back and forth from Ohio to Washington, I knew I had to have a full tank of gas by 4:00 in the afternoon because there wasn’t a single filling station between Washington and Ohio that was open. When we, when my wife and I drove home in March 1981, she was asleep on the seat and we drove up into Hillsborough, Ohio, and there the lights were on at the filling station where they’d been closed for nearly 3 years, and I woke her up, I said, “See sweetheart? Had we not won the election, this never would have happened.”
-- Bob McEwen		 
We have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the FED. They are not government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers.
-- Louis McFadden		 
It was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence...The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all.
-- Louis McFadden		 
Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are US government institutions. They are not... they are private credit monopolies which prey upon the people of the US for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will.
-- Louis McFadden		 
Mr. Chairman, I see no reason why citizens of the United States should be terrorized into surrendering their property to the International Bankers who own and control the Federal Reserve.
-- Louis McFadden		 
The men who rule the Democratic Party then promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reigns of government. Thirteen months later that promise was broken, and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free Country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the "King's Bank" to control us from the top downward, and from the cradle to the grave.
-- Louis McFadden		 
It was not accidental [the 1929 stock-market “crash”]. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. ... The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as rulers of us all.
-- Louis McFadden		 
The Federal Reserve (Banks) are one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. There is not a man within the sound of my voice who does not know that this Nation is run by the International Bankers.
-- Louis McFadden		 
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is eager to enter into close relationship with the Bank for International Settlements.... The conclusion is impossible to escape that the State and Treasury Departments are willing to pool the banking system of Europe and America, setting up a world financial power independent of and above the Government of the United States.... The United States under present conditions will be transformed from the most active of manufacturing nations into a consuming and importing nation with a balance of trade against it.
-- Louis McFadden		 
Open the books … and you will be staggered to see how much American money has been taken from the United States Treasury for the benefit of Russia. Find out what business has been transacted for the State Bank of Soviet Russia, by its correspondent, the Chase Bank of New York [owned by the Rockefellers].
-- Louis McFadden		 
What is needed here is a return to the Constitution of the United States. We need to have a complete divorce of Bank and State. The old struggle that was fought out here in Jackson's day must be fought over again... The Federal Reserve Act should be repealed and the Federal Reserve Banks, having violated their charters, should be liquidated immediately. Faithless Government officers who have violated their oaths of office should be impeached and brought to trial. Unless this is done by us, I predict that the American people, outraged, robbed, pillaged, insulted, and betrayed as they are in their own land, will rise in their wrath and send a President here who will sweep the money changers out of the temple.
-- Louis McFadden		 
(The Great Depression resulting from the Stock Market crash) was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence....The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of us all.
-- Louis McFadden		 
When the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and industrialists...acting together to enslave the world...Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is--the Fed has usurped the government.
-- Louis McFadden		 
I’m going to introduce a resolution to have the postmaster general stop reading dirty books and deliver the mail.
-- Gail W. McGee		 
Those wearing Tolerance for a label, Call other views intolerable.
-- Phyllis McGinley		 
I am not a number, I am a free man!
-- Patrick McGoohan		 
The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher standard.
-- George McGovern		 
I would support a Presidential candidate who pledged to take the following steps: ... At the end of the war in the Persian Gulf, press for ... a 'new world order' based not upon Pax Americana but on peace through law with a stronger U.N. and World Court.
-- George McGovern		 
In May 1998, [Los Angeles Times publisher Mark] Willis told the Wall Street Journal that he wanted to make the Times more appealing to women and minorities by producing stories that were “more emotional, more personal and less analytic.”
-- William McGowan		 
Journalism is a profession that prides itself on its maverick outspokenness and allergic reaction to preconceived notions. Yet, in today’s media some notions are considered beyond scrutiny – including the merits of the diversity agenda.
-- William McGowan		 
Rules are written for those who lack the ability to truly reason. But for those who can, rules become nothing more than guidelines, and live their lives governed not by rules but by reason.
-- James McGuigan		 
I think the world is run by 'C' students.
-- Al McGuire		 
Those who create and issue money and credit direct the policies of government and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.
-- Reginald McKenna		 
I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create and destroy money. And they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of governments, and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.
-- Reginald McKenna		 
If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on.
-- Terence McKenna		 
We could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was ... there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.
-- William McKinley		 
In my profession, it is not enough to know your history, speak a language and be widely traveled. Equally important is how to weigh and organize evidence. How to listen. How to see a situation from the other person's point of view. How to deal with complexity and realize that few issues in the world come with just one side. How to learn, not what to think.
-- John E. McLaughlin		 
Most of our diversions do not so much delay death as accustom us to it.
-- Mignon McLaughlin		 
It's impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time.
-- Mignon McLaughlin		 
Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.
-- Mignon McLaughlin		 
That distinct sovereignties could exist under one government, emanating from the same people, was a phenomenon in the political world, which the wisest statesmen in Europe could not comprehend; and of its practicability many in our own country entertained the most serious doubts. Thus far the friends of liberty have had great cause of triumph in the success of the principles upon which our government rests. But all must admit that the purity and permanency of this system depend on its faithful administration. The states and the federal government have their respective orbits, within which each must revolve. If either cross the sphere of the other, the harmony of the system is destroyed, and its strength is impaired. It would be as gross usurpation on the part of the federal government, to interfere with state rights, by an exercise of powers not delegated; as it would be for a state to interpose its authority against a law of the union.
-- Justice John McLean		 


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