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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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If through your vices you afflicted are, Lay not the blame of your distress on God; You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards, So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod.
-- Solon		 
A half truth is the worst of all lies, because it can be defended in partiality.
-- Solon		 
We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by it as those who have been.
-- Solon		 
You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power - he's FREE again.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
There also exists another alliance -- at first glance a strange one, a surprising one -- but if you think about it, in fact, one which is well grounded and easy to understand. This is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists. This alliance is not new. ... We observe continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the West of the Soviet Communist leaders.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust ... and prevent those ... because of short-sightedness and still others out of self-interest, from falsely using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. Because they are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat. ... I call upon you: ordinary working men of America ... do not let yourselves become weak.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
At what exact point, then should one resist the communists? ... How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests people had simply not sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. ... The Organs [police] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers ... and notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn		 
Wisdom outweighs any wealth.
-- Sophocles		 
Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.
-- Sophocles		 
Without labor nothing prospers.
-- Sophocles		 
Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.
-- George Soros		 
He who shits on the road will meet flies on his return.
-- South African Saying		 
Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.
-- Southern California Oracle		 
Easier were it To hurl the rooted mountain from its base, Than force the yoke of slavery upon men Determin'd to be free.
-- Robert Southey		 
Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain.
-- Dr. Thomas Sowell		 
The economic disasters of socialism and communism come from assuming a blanket superiority of those who want to run a whole economy.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
It doesn't matter what rights you have under the Constitution of the United States, if the government can punish you for exercising those rights. And it doesn't matter what limits the Constitution puts on government officials' power, if they can exceed those limits without any adverse consequences. In other words, the Constitution cannot protect you, if you don't protect the Constitution with your votes against anyone who violates it. Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped. As long as millions of Americans vote on the basis of who gives them free stuff, look for their freedom -- and all our freedom -- to be eroded away, bit by bit. Our children and grandchildren may yet come to see the Constitution as just some quaint words from the past that people once took seriously.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
While rationalism at the individual level is a plea for more personal autonomy from cultural norms, at the social level it is often a claim -- or arrogation -- of power to stifle the autonomy of others.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
A recent poll showed that nearly half the American public believes that the government should redistribute wealth. That so many people are so willing to blithely put such an enormous and dangerous arbitrary power in the hands of politicians -- risking their own freedom, in hopes of getting what someone else has -- is a painful sign of how far many citizens and voters fall short of what is needed to preserve a democratic republic.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
The reason so many problems do not get solved in Washington is that solving those problems is not the No. 1 priority: Re-election is.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
The talkers and writers resent being left on the sidelines by the doers.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices -- paid by others.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
When your response to everything that is wrong with the world is to say, 'there ought to be a law,' you are saying that you hold freedom very cheap.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people -- namely, the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Neither your life nor my life, nor the future of this country, will be affected in the slightest by whether Linda Tripp is naughty or nice. But if any president is able to commit crimes with impunity by using the vast powers and perquisites of his office to cover up, then we will have a danger of corruption and abuse of power that can only grow with the passing years and generations.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Compassion is the use of public funds to buy votes.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
'What freedom does a starving man have?' The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition- perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Liberals seem to assume that, if you don't believe in their particular political solutions, then you don't really care about the people that they claim to want to help.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
There are only two ways of telling the complete truth - anonymously and posthumously.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Force is the antithesis of freedom, but force must be used, if only to defend against other force.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
'For every $1.00 major corporations gave to conservative and free-market groups, they gave $4.61 to organizations seeking more government,' according to a study by the Capital Research Center, a Washington think tank.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
To those who feel that their values are THE values, the less controlled systems necessarily present a spectacle of "chaos," simply because such systems respond to a diversity of values. The more successfully such systems respond to diversity, the more "chaos" there will be, by definition, according to the standards of ANY specific set of values- other than diversity or freedom as values. Looked at another way, the more self-righteous observers there are, the more chaos (and "waste") will be seen.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
The death of media influence has been greatly exaggerated.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
The next time somebody in the media denies that there is media bias, ask how they explain the fact that there are at least a hundred stories about the shrinking arctic ice cap for every one about the expanding antarctic ice cap, which has now grown to record size.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Any politician who starts shouting election-year demagoguery about the rich and the poor should be asked, "What about the other 90 percent of the people?
-- Thomas Sowell		 
We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: 'But what would you replace it with?' When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
With all the pious talk about "tolerance" in the media and in academia, there is virtually none for those who challenge the dogmas of political correctness in most of our colleges and universities.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
Journalists cannot serve two masters. To the extent that they take on the task of suppressing information or biting their tongue for the sake of some political agenda, they are betraying the trust of the public and corrupting their own profession.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
One of the most pathetic — and dangerous — signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires — and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.
-- Thomas Sowell		 
The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid.
-- Art Spander		 
Lucifer comes to give us the final … Luciferic initiation … that many people now and in the days ahead, will be facing—for it is an initiation into the New Age. … No one will enter the New World Order unless he or she will make a pledge to worship Lucifer. No one will enter the New Age unless he will take a Luciferian initiation.
-- David Spangler		 
No one will enter the New World Order unless he or she will make a pledge to worship Lucifer. No one will enter the New Age unless he will take a Luciferian Initiation.
-- David Spangler (False)		 


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