Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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I am I plus my circumstances.
-- José Ortega y Gasset		 
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
-- José Ortega y Gasset		 
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
-- George Orwell		 
At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.
-- George Orwell		 
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
-- George Orwell		 
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
-- George Orwell		 
The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
-- George Orwell		 
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidarity to pure wind.
-- George Orwell		 
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
-- George Orwell		 
Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
-- George Orwell (False)		 
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
-- George Orwell		 
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
-- George Orwell		 
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
-- George Orwell		 
Freedom is Slavery
-- George Orwell		 
The ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle, home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics, he feels himself master of his fate. But otherwise he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.
-- George Orwell		 
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ...
-- George Orwell		 
All animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others.
-- George Orwell		 
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-- George Orwell		 
The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.
-- George Orwell		 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- George Orwell		 
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
-- George Orwell		 
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
-- George Orwell		 
To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.
-- George Orwell		 
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
-- George Orwell		 
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is “not done”… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
-- George Orwell		 
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
-- George Orwell		 
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
-- George Orwell		 
Loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature... The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
-- George Orwell		 
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
-- George Orwell		 
The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders.
-- George Orwell		 
Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
-- George Orwell		 
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
-- George Orwell		 
Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.
-- George Orwell		 
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
-- George Orwell		 
Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.
-- John Osborne		 
Being Politically Correct means always having to say you're sorry.
-- Charles Osgood		 
There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the Law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free, and they have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves so, if they please.
-- James Otis		 
Taxation without representation is tyranny.
-- James Otis		 
If it would be wrong for the government to adopt an official religion, then, for the same reasons, it would be wrong for the government to adopt official education policies. The moral case for freedom of religion stands or falls with that for freedom of education. A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do.
-- James R. Otteson		 
Petty laws breed great crimes.
-- Ouida		 
In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes.
-- P. D. Ouspensky		 
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
-- P. D. Ouspensky		 
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
-- Ovid		 
It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.
-- Ovid		 
Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor. (I see the better way, and approve it; I follow the worse.)
-- Ovid		 
Can anybody point me to that one time in history where the side that was demanding censorship, segregation, propaganda, radical education, papers to move freely in society, plus government forces going door to door to demand compliance were the good guys?
-- Candace Owens		 
Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?
-- Count Axel Oxenstierna		 
The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.
-- Vance Packard		 
It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.
-- Camille Paglia		 
Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.... Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.
-- Judge James Paine		 
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.
-- Thomas Paine		 
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.
-- Thomas Paine		 
This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still.
-- Thomas Paine		 
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
-- Thomas Paine		 
I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel ... for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.
-- Thomas Paine		 
It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those that are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
-- Thomas Paine		 
But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes?
-- Thomas Paine		 
Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
-- Thomas Paine		 
If there must be trouble let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
-- Thomas Paine		 
A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
-- Thomas Paine		 
For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?
-- Thomas Paine		 


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