Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined or hard to check as a socially ambitious mother.
-- Will Rogers		 
Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy until you can find a rock.
-- Will Rogers		 
Don't let yesterday use up too much of today.
-- Will Rogers		 
You can have all the advanced war methods you want, but, after all, nobody has ever invented a war that you don't have to have somebody in the guise of soldiers to stop the bullets.
-- Will Rogers		 
On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
-- Will Rogers		 
Income taxes have made more liars out of the American people than golf.
-- Will Rogers		 
How is the government going to get the extra taxes? Out of the rich -- or just out of the poor, as usual?
-- Will Rogers		 
Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth!
-- Will Rogers		 
If we took Congress seriously, we would be worrying all the time.
-- Will Rogers		 
Farmers, get out your sense of humor! Congress meets to relieve you again next week.
-- Will Rogers		 
I don't make jokes -- I just watch the government and report the facts.
-- Will Rogers		 
Things in our country run in spite of the government, not by the aid of it.
-- Will Rogers		 
The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.
-- Will Rogers		 
One of these days they are going to remove so much of the 'hooey' and the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth of the price and learn 'em something that they might accidentally use after they escape.
-- Will Rogers		 
Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
-- Will Rogers		 
Fairness does not require the redistribution of wealth; it requires the creation of wealth, geared to an economy that can provide employment for everyone able and willing to work.
-- Felix Rohatyn		 
Since I am an immature and wicked man, war and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.
-- Ernst Rohm		 
The relative openness or closedness of a mind cuts across specific content; that is, it is not restricted to any one particular ideology, or religion, or philosophy, or scientific viewpoint.
-- Milton Rokeach		 
O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!
-- Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland		 
The test for whether one is living in a police state is that those who are charged with enforcing the law are allowed to break the laws with impunity.
-- Jon Roland		 
We make money the old fashioned way. We print it.
-- Art Rolnick		 
I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control.
-- George L. Roman		 
Felix qui nihil debet. (Happy is he who owes nothing.)
-- Roman Proverb		 
Give me control over a man's economic actions, and hence over his means of survival, and except for a few occasional heroes, I'll promise to deliver to you men who think and write and behave as I want them to.
-- Benjamin A. Rooge		 
Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
We do not move forward by curtailing people’s liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
Those of us who believe in the right of any human being to belong to whatever church he sees fit, and to worship God in his own way, cannot be accused of prejudice when we do not want to see public education connected with religious control of the schools, which are paid for by taxpayers' money.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
Smearing good people like Lauchlin Currie [former administrative assistant to President Roosevelt], Alger Hiss and others is, I think, unforgiveable... Anyone knowing Mr. Currie or Mr. Hiss, who are the two people whom I happen to know fairly well, would not need any denial on their part to know they are not Communists. Their records prove it.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
Spiritual leadership should remain spiritual leadership and the temporal power should not become too important in any church.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
The things you refuse to meet today always come back at you later on, usually under circumstances which make the decision twice as difficult as it originally was.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt		 
Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants?
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind -- men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others -- men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perception.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
It is a good thing to demand liberty for ourselves and for those who agree with us, but it is a better thing and a rarer thing to give liberty to others who do not agree with us.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
[The commerce clause was written] in the horse-and-buggy age ... since that time … we have developed an entirely different philosophy. ... We are interdependent, we are tied in together. And the hope has been that we could, through a period of years, interpret the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution in the light of these new things that have come to the country. It has been our hope that under the interstate commerce clause we could recognize by legislation and by judicial decision that a harmful practice in one section of the country could be prevented on the theory that it was doing harm to another section of the country. That was why the Congress for a good many years, and most lawyers, have had the thought that in drafting legislation we could depend on an interpretation that would enlarge the constitutional meaning of interstate commerce to include not only those matters of direct interstate commerce, but also those matters which indirectly affect interstate commerce.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
We, and all others who believe in freedom as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
I do not believe in communism any more than you do, but there is nothing wrong with the communists in this country. Several of the best friends I have are Communists.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
We all know that books will burn -- yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory...
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson. History depicts Andrew Jackson as the last truly honorable and incorruptible American president.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
The saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities -- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self-reliant enough to be free.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
Knowledge -- that is, education in its true sense -- is our best protection against unreasoning prejudice and panic-making fear, whether engendered by special interest, illiberal minorities, or panic-stricken leaders.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt		 
No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
All constitutions, those of the States no less than that of the nation, are designed, and must be interpreted and administered so as to fit human rights.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Free speech exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
In strict confidence … I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Freedom is not a gift which can be enjoyed save by those shown themselves worthy of it.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph of war.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
All privileges based on wealth, and all emnity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Any man who tries to incite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do so in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainty that class’s own worst enemy.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. ... Every man who parrots the cry of “stand by the President” without adding the proviso “so far as he serves the Republic” takes an attitude as essentially unmanly as that of any Stuart royalist who championed the doctrine that the King could do no wrong. No self-respecting and intelligent free man could take such an attitude.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of others. He must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow man a responsibility which is not theirs.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society.
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 
When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'present' or 'not guilty.'
-- Theodore Roosevelt		 


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