Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton		 
Government is like fire. If it is kept within bounds and under the control of the people, it contributes to the welfare of all. But if it gets out of place, if it gets too big and out of control, it destroys the happiness and even the lives of the people.
-- Harold E. Stassen		 
The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament...
-- State Department Paper 7277		 
No free government was ever founded or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defense of the state.... Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the  freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.
-- State Gazette (Charleston)		 
The maintenance of the right to bear arms is a most essential one to every free people and should not be whittled down by technical constructions.
-- State vs. Kerner		 
Disobedience or evasion of a constitutional mandate may not be tolerated, even though such disobedience may, at least temporarily, promote in some respects the best interests of the public.
-- State v. Board of Examiners		 
When any court violates the clean and unambiguous language of the constitution, a fraud is perpetrated and no one is bound to obey it.
-- State v. Sutton		 
Freedom always carries a burden of proof, always throws us back on ourselves.
-- Shelby Steele		 
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
-- Gertrude Stein		 
Man is the only kind of varmint that sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
-- John Steinbeck		 
And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system.
-- John Steinbeck		 
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.
-- John Steinbeck		 
We may be thankful that frightened civil authorities ... have not managed to eradicate from the country the tradition of the possession and use of firearms, that profound and almost instinctive tradition of Americans. Luckily for us, our tradition of bearing arms has not gone from the country, the tradition is so deep and so dear to us that it is one of the most treasured parts of the Bill of Rights -- the right of all Americans to bear arms, with the implication that they will know how to use them.
-- John Steinbeck		 
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
-- Saul Steinberg		 
Law and justice are not always the same.
-- Gloria Steinem		 
No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.
-- Gloria Steinem		 
What is necessary to keep providing good care to nature has completely fallen into ignorance during the materialism era.
-- Rudolf Steiner		 
Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable actions.
-- Stendhal		 
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
-- Stendhal		 
They said it couldn't be done but sometimes it doesn't work out that way.
-- Casey Stengel		 
The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.
-- George Stephanopolous		 
If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries.
-- Leslie Stephen		 
Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only by incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infintesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness.
-- Leslie Stephen		 
Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you (religionists) whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance. And, meanwhile, we will endeavour to be as charitable as possible, and whilst you trumpet forth officially your contempt for our skepticism, we will at least try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own bluster.
-- Leslie Stephen		 
Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.
-- Sir Leslie Stephen		 
The only shape in which equality is really connected with justice is this – justice presupposes general rules. If these general rules are to be maintained at all, it is obvious that they must be applied equally to every case which satisfies their terms.
-- James Fitzjames Stephens		 
So, what the cultural elites are doing is what plenty of other authoritarian and totalitarian societies have done in the past. They are making the cost of telling the truth high enough that a general mass of people will be afraid to declare it publicly or even privately.
-- Jarrett Stepman		 
When you think about it if somebody is a legal and responsible gun owner, let’s say in Massachusetts, why all of a sudden when he crossed the border is he an outlaw?
-- Howard Stern		 
Just as the right to speak and the right to refrain from speaking are complementary components of a broader concept of individual freedom, so also the individual’s freedom to choose his own creed is the counterpart of his right to refrain from accepting the creed established by the majority.
-- Justice John Paul Stevens		 
The government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion.
-- Justice John Paul Stevens		 
As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.
-- Justice John Paul Stevens		 
The agency that is so strict on the way Americans keep their books cannot even pass a financial audit.
-- Ted Stevens		 
Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than the freedom to stagnate.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
Newspaper editors separate the wheat from the chaff -- and print the chaff.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
Freedom rings where opinions clash.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
We in America today would limit our freedom of expression and of conscience. In the name of unity, they would impose a narrow conformity of ideas and opinion… Only a government which fights for civil liberties and equal rights for its own people can stand for freedom in the rest of the world.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow it wherever the search may lead us.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
A hungry man is not a free man.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
It is a common heresy and its graves are to be found all over the earth. It is the heresy that says you can kill an idea by killing a man, defeat a principle by defeating a person, bury truth by burying its vehicle.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson II		 
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson		 
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson		 
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson		 
Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson		 
Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in history text books.
-- Jimmy Stewart		 
The right to enjoy property without unlawful deprivation, no less that the right to speak out or the right to travel is, in truth, a “personal” right.
-- Justice Potter Stewart		 
The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights... . In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property.
-- Justice Potter Stewart		 
Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is the landmark of an authoritarian regime...
-- Justice Potter Stewart		 
The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.
-- Justice Potter Stewart		 
The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it’s invalid on its face.
-- Justice Potter Stewart		 
[A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve it’s high purpose when it indices a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with things as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for understanding.
-- Justice Potter Stewart		 
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.
-- Justice Potter Stewart		 
The state may not establish a ‘religion of secularism’ in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus ‘preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.'
-- Justice Potter Stewart		 
The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along.
-- Mark Steyn		 
If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country.
-- Mark Steyn		 
In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s mall for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later ... Let’s not go there.
-- Mark Steyn		 
To put it baldly, there are two ways to become wealthy: to create wealth or to take wealth away from others. The former adds to society. The latter typically subtracts from it, for in the process of taking it away, wealth gets destroyed. A monopolist who overcharges for his product takes money from those whom he is overcharging and at the same time destroys value. To get his monopoly price, he has to restrict production.
-- Joseph E. Stiglitz		 
Illegitimati non carborundum. (Don't let the bastards grind you down.)
-- General Joseph W. Stilwell		 
When the news first came that Japan had attacked us my first feeling was of relief that … a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people. This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed.
-- Henry Stimson		 
We face the delicate question of the diplomatic fencing to be done so as to be sure Japan is put into the wrong and makes the first bad move. … The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot.
-- Henry Stimson		 
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime. 
-- Max Stirner		 
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.
-- Max Stirner		 
A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists.
-- Max Stirner		 
The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people ... from knowing what the nation’s leaders are doing.
-- John Stockwell		 
Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn.
-- John Stockwell		 
To call Congress emasculated is to insult eunuchs.
-- David C. Stolinsky		 
The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided.
-- Harlan F. Stone		 
If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant's natural god-given unalienable or constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law.
-- Harlan F. Stone		 
The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided.
-- Harlan F. Stone		 
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
-- Tom Stoppard		 
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
-- Tom Stoppard		 
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
-- Tom Stoppard		 
The pretence is made that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness, and social chaos. The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respected people have escaped from moral chains and are able to think freely.
-- J. A. Stormer		 


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