The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations A classic since 1953 with over 20,000 quotes from over 3,000 authors.
Famous Last Words Apt Observations, Pleas, Curses, Benedictions, Sour Notes, Bons Mots, and Insights from People on the Brink of Departure
Stretch Your Wings Famous Black Quotations for the Young
American Quotations An exhaustive collection of profound quotes from the founding fathers, presidents, statesmen, scientists, constitutions, court decisions
The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations
Last Words of Saints and Sinners 700 Final Quotes from the Famous, the Infamous, and the Inspiring Figures of History
America's God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations Contains over 2,100 profound quotations from founding fathers, presidents, constitutions, court decisions and more
The Law This 1850 classic is an absolute must read for anyone interested in law, justice, truth, or liberty. A most compelling and revolutionary look at The Law.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition)
The Stupidest Things Ever Said by Politicians Rise up, America -- and laugh out loud at the greatest gaffes that no spin doctor could possibly fix!
The 776 Even Stupider Things Ever Said Another great collection of stupidity
Quotable Quotes Wit and Wisdom for All Occasions from America's Most Popular Magazine
The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time You don't have to be a genius to sound like one. Here's a collection of the most profound and provocative wit and wisdom in the English language in two lines or less.
2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs Invaluable sampler of witticisms, epigrams, sayings, bon mots, platitudes and insights chosen for their brevity and pithiness.
Phillips' Book of Great Thoughts Funny Sayings A stupendous collection of quotes, quips, epigrams, witticisms, and humorous comments for personal enjoyment and ready reference.
Quick Quips and Quotes; 532 Things I Wish I Had Said Quick Quips and Quotes is the Ultimate Collection of one liners.
Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes The ultimate anthology of anecdotes, now revised with over 700 new entries.
Quotations for Public Speakers A Historical, Literary, and Political Anthology
Liberty - The American Revolution This compelling series traces the events leading up to the war and America's fight for freedom.
Founding Fathers The story of how these disparate characters fomented rebellion in the colonies, formed the Continental Congress, fought the Revolutionary War, and wrote the Constitution
Libertarianism: A Primer David Boaz, director of the Cato Institute, has written a simple introduction to Libertarianism inteneded to appeal to disgruntled Democrats and Republicans everywhere.
The Libertarian Reader Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman
Thomas Paine: Collected Writings All the classics: Common Sense / The Crisis / Rights of Man / The Age of Reason / Pamphlets, Articles, and Letters |
| | Quotes are organized by Name and Category.
Here's the Daily Quotes Log to date.
Cryptograms!
Do you like cryptograms? We've got thousands!
Authors
Indexed quotes by Author or Speaker.
Categories
Browse quotes by category or select from the list below.
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| Lord Acton | And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. | |
| Astrid Alauda | Flowers don't open to the clock but to the sunshine spontaneous;for modern humans that manner of instinct is now extraneous. | |
| Gary Allen | If one understands that Socialism is not a “share the wealth” program but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super rich men promoting Socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately Socialism, is not a movement of the down-trodden masses but of the economic elite. | |
| Saint Thomas Aquinas | The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing. | |
| Stephen Arons | Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy? | |
| Michael Badnarik | The Democrats and Republicans stand at two extremes, characterized by which parts of our lives they emphasize their desire to control. Libertarians reject both extremes in favor of the government leaving control of your life to you. | |
| William Barr | In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted, especially in France. This is greatly due to a fatal desire -- learned from the teachings of antiquity -- that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works. | |
| Hilaire Belloc | The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes… Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain. | |
| Neal Boortz | You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?' | |
| Mika Brezinski | And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens, [President Trump] could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control what people think. And that, that is our job. | |
| Yaron Brook | But while capitalism may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism. | |
| Harry Browne | Government is a parasite—a cancer that by nature tries to spread deeper into society. Those who want to run others’ lives won’t give up and start minding their own business. | |
| Tammy Bruce | As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought. | |
| Alan Bullock | No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance. | |
| Edmund Burke | The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered. | |
| Edmund Burke | Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. | |
| H. Sterling Burnett | Guns are used for self-defense somewhere between 800,000 and 3.6 million times per year .... Using firearm crime and defensive gun use figures most favorable to advocates for stricter gun control, ... the benefits from defensive gun uses exceed the cost of violent firearm crimes ... by between $90 million and $3.5 billion. Using the most credible estimate for defensive gun uses, the benefits range from $1 billion to $38 billion. Putting these dollar figures in more human terms: Guns save lives. The fact is that the best defense against violence is an armed response. For example, women faced with assault are 2.5 times less likely to suffer serious injury if they defend themselves with a gun rather than responding with other weapons or by offering no resistance. ... [P]ersons defending themselves with guns during an assault are injured only 12 percent of the time, compared to 25 percent for those using other weapons, 27 percent for those offering no resistance and nearly 26 percent of those who flee. ... [F]irearms are the safest, most effective way to protect oneself against criminal activity -- which is why American police officers carry guns rather than going unarmed or merely carrying knives. | |
| Oscar Callaway | In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. … They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers. | |
| Oscar Callaway | I regret to say it, but we are gradually turning over the business of Congress, turning over all our constitutional rights, turning over our powers delegated by the people to a lot of editors, theorists, and college professors who are not capable of conducting our affairs and to whom we should not abdicate. | |
| Dennis Cauchon | Most reporters are very sympathetic to gun-control agendas and will skew or lie outright about facts to promote them. | |
| W. H. Chamberlin | One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves & seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized every thing. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State & more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic & social system. | |
| Frank Chodorov | The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as "free education" is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control. | |
| Noam Chomsky | The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school. | |
| James Fenimore Cooper | Commerce is entitled to a complete and efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes to control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high principles of natural justice that ought to lie at the root of every political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked. | |
| Steven Crowder | It's important to understand that the idea of political correctness, from its inception, was designed as a political weapon to silence voices of dissent ... today’s social media outrage can be tomorrow’s laws. | |
| Steven Crowder | This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you...
Hate speech is inextricably tied to political correctness, or Cultural Marxism, and that creates intellectual conformity -- or intellectual authoritarianism. And that’s where you start to see things like “safe spaces” or “trigger warnings” or speakers banned from campus, or people with unpopular opinions banned from social media. | |
| Steven Crowder | This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you... | |
| M. Robin D'Antan | Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant. The further society "progresses," the grander the scale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries. | |
| Theodore Dalrymple | Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. | |
| Perry de Havilland | The Radical Centre seem to have the same obsession with control that the fascists and communists had, but unlike them, it is control for control's sake rather than in the service of some clear ideology ... They do not seek the triumph of Volk or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they just seek to replace all social interactions with politically mediated interactions. They seek to regulate everything via a total state that ... just wants a world in which nothing whatsoever is private, everything is political. Their symbol is not the Hammer and Sickle or the Swastika, it is the CCTV camera. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | [Tyrannical] power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? | |
| Frederick Douglass | What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? ... Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God -- less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. It assumes that nature has erred; that the law of liberty is a mistake; that freedom, though a natural want of the human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom; that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. What shall be done with them? Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone. | |
| Robert Dowlut | Gun control stems from racist roots, and ... it undermines feminism by send[ing] women the message that they should not use force to defend themselves. | |
| Lt. Lowell Duckett | Gun control has not worked in D.C. The only people who have guns are criminals. We have the strictest gun laws in the nation and one of the highest murder rates. It's quicker to pull your Smith and Wesson than to dial 911 if you're being robbed. | |
| Olive Cushing Dwinell | Hamilton's whole monetary policy is based on unconstitutional grounds and unsound reasoning, and fraudulent statements. His policies were fought through the whole public career of Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph and many another truly great lovers of Republican Government.
His policies have proved to be more destructive of our independent and democratic form of government than the old subjugation of the Colonies by Great Britain. The deliberations in Congress over Hamilton's Bank Bill, and the opinions of members of The Cabinet show the intensity of feeling between the private money interests and those supporting the Constitution. History records that the “money changers” have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance. | |
| Richard M. Ebeling | In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process -- learning the same "official history," the same "civic virtues," the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the independent soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political authorities wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was worship of the nation -- state and obedience to the Duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite. We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the "robber barons" of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn of the century; that wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman. | |
| Brian Eno | What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda'. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'. | |
| Marilyn Ferguson | We are not liberated until we liberate others. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves. | |
| Johann Gottlieb Fichte | Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. | |
| Stanley Fish | Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior. | |
| Alan Dean Foster | Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting. | |
| Milton Friedman | Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. | |
| Milton Friedman | If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies. | |
| Marshall Fritz | Charter schools are just public schools on a slightly longer leash. A dog on a long leash is still a dog on a leash. | |
| Markus T. Funk | Murder rates in "gun controlled" areas, such as Mexico and South Africa, are more than twice as high as those in the United States. Conversely, countries such as Switzerland, New Zealand, and Israel, which have household gun ownership rates comparable to those in the United States, have much lower rates of crime and violence. | |
| Rick Gaber | Control freaks who sneer at people who have 'faith' in the free market (voluntary trading) must be fantasizing an allegedly 'higher' political end than freedom. | |
| Rick Gaber | If I said, "The live-and-let-live people I've met are generally warm and generous, although often reserved and respectful, while the control freaks I've met are generally cynical, mean and aggressively obnoxious," would that seem likely to be true? Of course it does. It IS true, and it's obviously logically consistent and what you'd expect. BUT, if I said, "I've found the intellectual defenders of private property and laissez-faire capitalism whom I've met to be generally warm and generous, while the so-called "liberal" defenders of the welfare state I've found to be often cynical, mean and tight-fisted in their personal lives," would THAT seem likely to be true? Think about it. Well, it's also true ... it's a matter of semantics, or word choice. BECAUSE BOTH SENTENCES SAY EXACTLY THE SAME THING. | |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it. | |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state. | |
| Laurie Garrett | [W]hat suffers in the atmosphere of immediacy is analysis. What suffers in this search for speed is depth. The media in the wealthy world are becoming increasingly simplistic, superficial, and celebrity-focused. | |
| Ruth Gavison | Describing an action or an event as the "consequence" of speech presupposes that there is some causal connection between them. A central issue in any debate about the limits of free speech is the nature and the imminence of the causal connection between speech and its alleged consequences…. In actual social situations it is impossible to isolate factors and determine their contribution to effects. Such control is extremely complicated even in a scientific laboratory. | |
| William Glasser | There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison. | |
| William Godwin | Government will not fail to employ education to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions. | |
| William Godwin | To dragoon man into the adoption of what we think right, is an intolerable tyranny. | |
| William Godwin | Let us consider the effect that coercion produces upon the mind of him against whom it is employed. It cannot begin with convincing; it is no argument. It begins with producing the sensation of pain, and the sentiment of distaste. It begins with violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. It includes in it a tacit confession of imbecility. If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is important, but he really punishes me because his argument is weak. | |
| Alan Greenspan | Regulation -- which is based on force and fear -- undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory. | |
| Edwin Arthur Hall | Before the advent of Hitler or Stalin, who took their power from the German and the Russian people, measures were thrust upon the free legislatures of those countries to deprive the people of the possession and use of firearms, so that they could not resist the encroachments of such diabolical and vitriolic state police organizations as the Gestapo, the Ogpu, and the Cheka. Just as sure as I am standing here today, you are going to see this measure followed by legislation, sponsored by the proponents of such encroachment upon the rights of the people, which will eventually deprive the people of their constitutional liberty which provides for the possession of firearms for the protection of their homes. I submit to you that it is a serious departure from constitutional government when we consider legislation of this type. I predict that within 6 months of this time there will be presented to this House a measure which will go a long way toward taking away forever the individual rights and liberties of citizens of this Nation by depriving the individual of the private ownership of firearms and the right to use weapons in the protection of his home, and thereby his country. | |
| William T. Harris | Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their
inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between
exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The
conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches
and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the
change "orderly." | |
| Helen Hegener | Our tightly controlled educational system mocks the promise of democracy. With a closed educational system we simply cannot have an open political system. The current situation allows the government and big business to manufacture and maintain our culture for us, and in turn, control remains in the hands of the experts and institutions. The ability to change this situation is in the hands of the individuals and families who understand why change is necessary. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. | |
| Patrick Henry | Let Mr. Madison tell me when did liberty ever exist when the sword and the purse were given up from the people? Unless a miracle shall interpose, no nation ever did, nor ever can retain its liberty after the loss of the sword and the purse. | |
| Auberon Herbert | If we cannot learn, if the only effect upon us of the presence of the dynamiter in our midst is to make us multiply punishments, invent restrictions, increase the number of our official spies, forbid public meetings, interfere with the press, put up gratings -- as in one country they propose to do -- in our House of Commons, scrutinize visitors under official microscopes, request them, as at Vienna, and I think now at Paris also, to be good enough to leave their greatcoats in the vestibules ... I venture to prophesy that there lies before us a bitter and an evil time. | |
| William P. Hoar | Statists relish "crises" because they can be used to force more controls into our lives. | |
| Thomas Hodgskin | Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master. | |
| Eric Hoffer | A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will. | |
| Eric Hoffer | The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us. | |
| John Holt | No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back. | |
| John Holt | People who make careers out of helping others -- sometimes at great sacrifice, often not -- usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help. | |
| Jacob G. Hornberger | [D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people’s lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became. | |
| Jack Hugh | Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control. | |
| Jack Hugh | Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control. | |
| Justice Charles Evans Hughes | While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty. | |
| David Hume | Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few. | |
| Suzanna Gratia Hupp | How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. | |
| I Ching | Mistrust the people and they become untrustworthy. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | No man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth. | |
| George Jonas | The issue isn't gun control but state control -- obtuse and arbitrary state control, state control run amok. ... Forget guns. If Dr. Hudson, Mr. Turnbull, Dr. Gingrich and others end up in jail it won't be for their guns but our liberties. | |
| Don B. Kates, Jr. | Ironically, the only gun control in 19th century England was the policy forbidding police to have arms while on duty. | |
| Garrison Keillor | You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion. | |
| Kathe Kollwitz | I was put in this world to change it. | |
| Charles Krauthammer | The Brady Bill's only effect will be to desensitize the public to regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation. | |
| Robert J. Kukla | Those who have sought the most in gun control have sought the least in the punishment of criminals. | |
| Benedict D. LaRosa | Since independence in the fourteenth century, the Swiss have been required to keep and bear arms, and since 1515, have had a policy of armed neutrality. Its form of government is similar to the one set up by our Founders -- a weak central government exercising few, defined powers having to do mostly with external affairs and limited authority over internal matters at the canton (state) and local levels. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists' puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man's opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. | |
| John V. Lindsay | Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order. | |
| James Russell Lowell | The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. | |
| James Madison | A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. | |
| James Madison | If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. | |
| Everett Dean Martin | One of the serious results of propaganda is that it has caused the public to think that education and propaganda are the same thing, and thus to make an ignorant multitude believe it is being educated when it is only being manipulated. Education aims at independence of judgement. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd. | |
| Everett Dean Martin | It is the trivial, the irrelevant, the sensational, the appeal to obsolete bigotry which naturally give it greatest publicity. In such publicity it becomes a mere vulgar caricature of itself. | |
| Everett Dean Martin | The educator aims at a slow process of development; the propagandist, at quick results. The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects. The educator wants thinking; the propagandist, action. The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind. | |
| John F. McManus | Left has come to represent increasing government control. The extreme leftist typically seeks total government. Working their way toward total government power are the Communists, socialists, fascists, and modern liberals who advocate government solutions for every real or imagined problem. | |
| Carey McWilliams | Censors are infused with the sentiment of moral indignation – a dangerous and misleading sentiment because, by blinding those who voice it to the real reasons for their indignation, it makes them puppets whose fears can be manipulated for ends and purposes they do not foresee or intend. | |
| Frank Straus Meyer | The ideal type of the Communist is a man in whom all individual, emotional, and unconscious elements have been reduced to a minimum and subjected to the control of an iron will, informed by a supple intellect. That intellect is totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed ‘scientifically’ through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism. | |
| Arthur S. Miller | Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men. This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order... A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment - the ruling class - is not supposed to be discussed. | |
| Michael Moriarty | We've been asleep for about 50 years. Ever since the end of World War II we just steadily handed our future and our bank accounts and now our children, handed them all over to the federal government... | |
| Benito Mussolini | State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. | |
| Benito Mussolini | It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission, and welds them into unity. | |
| Ralph Nader | Is there a number or mark planned for the hand or forehead in a new cashless society? YES, and I have seen the machines that are now ready to put it into operation. | |
| National Education Association Resolution | The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Socialism itself can hope to exist only for brief periods here and there, and then only through the exercise of the extremest terrorism. For this reason it is secretly preparing itself for rule through fear and is driving the word “justice” into the heads of the half-educated masses like a nail so as to rob them of their reason... and to create in them a good conscience for the evil game they are to play. | |
| Grover Norquist | The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat. | |
| Robert Nozick | Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone’s labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else. | |
| Supreme Court Of The United States | Under the Equal Protection clause, not to mention the First Amendment itself, government may not grant the use of a forum to people whose views it finds acceptable, but deny use to those wishing to express less favored or more controversial views. | |
| Thomas Paine | There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the `end of time,’ or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. ... Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. | |
| William Paley | Natural liberty is the right of common upon a waste; civil liberty is the safe, exclusive, unmolested enjoyment of a cultivated enclosure. | |
| Tom G. Palmer | If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command? | |
| Star Parker | This leftist political strategy to win office and power relies on something very powerful: the desire to increase the number of Americans who are dependent on getting money that is taken from other citizens.
Sadly, this strategy has worked for half a century! And now it works because Americans who are trapped in this nightmare do not want their government money taken away from them! | |
| Isabel Paterson | A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven’t had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It’s not capitalism when the system is plagued with incomprehensible rules regarding mergers, acquisitions, and stock sales, along with wage controls, price controls, protectionism, corporate subsidies, international management of trade, complex and punishing corporate taxes, privileged government contracts to the military-industrial complex, and a foreign policy controlled by corporate interests and overseas investments. Add to this centralized federal mismanagement of farming, education, medicine, insurance, banking and welfare. This is not capitalism! | |
| Leonard Peikoff | Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property—so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property. | |
| Pierre-Joseph Proudhon | To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so...\\
To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. | |
| Byron C. Radaker | Our government has found that the most effective way to control a person is not by the ballot or the bullet, but rather by the 'bucket'. Today, in a country that fought a revolution to rid itself of a repressive government and excessive taxes, government takes 40 percent of everything we earn in the form of taxes. | |
| Ayn Rand | When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion -- when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing -- when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors -- when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you -- when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice -- you may know that your society is doomed. | |
| Ayn Rand | Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a “time machine” and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century—would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets? | |
| Bert Rand | Any person or any so-called 'political spectrum' that equates live-and-let-livers with control freaks is even more evil than the worst control freaks themselves. | |
| Jon Rappoport | War, what is it good for? With the same "socialist" elites backing both sides, it's good for business. It's good for creating chaos and destruction. It's good for launching new global organizations, in the aftermath; organizations that exert a level of control and reach that didn't exist before. It's good for launching organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and the World Trade Organization---dedicated to Globalism, which in turn is dedicated to planned civilization, in which the individual is demeaned and the group is All. Freedom is demeaned; and dominance by the few over the many is hailed as peace in our time. | |
| Jon Rappoport | Think about the agendas behind universal vaccination, climate change, universal psychiatric treatment, GMO food, and other 'science-based' frauds. They all imply a false collectivist model, in which individuals give up their power in exchange for 'doing good' and becoming members of the largest group in the world: 'disabled' people with needs that must be addressed and satisfied. Instead of supporting the liberation of the individual, the controllers want to squash it. Why? Because they fear individual power. It is forever the unpredictable wild card. They want a society in which every thought an individual thinks connects him to a greater whole---and if that sounds attractive, understand that this Whole is a fiction, intentionally faked to resemble a genuine oceanic feeling. | |
| Daniel A. Reed | [S]ince 1933 those in control of the Government, realizing that the power to tax is the power to destroy,
have appeared before the Committee on Ways and Means with the proposal to tax firearms. While they narrowed it down to machine guns on the
ground that it would prevent bandits from using firearms of a certain size, yet the thought was there of getting control of the private firearms of this
country. I know that our chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and others on that committee were on the alert, sensed the danger, and
accordingly went no further than partial taxation and regulation, but I think every member of the committee saw the purpose and the motive of the
proposed tax. | |
| Charley Reese | It is both illogical and inconsistent for a government to say people have a right to life and a right
to self-defense but no right to own the tools necessary to defend their lives. It is illogical for a government that says its police have no obligation
to provide individual protection to deny people the means to protect themselves. It is immoral for a government that repeatedly releases
predators to prey on people to tell those victims they cannot have a weapon for self-defense. It’s stupid for a government that can’t control
criminals, drugs or illegal immigrants to claim it can take guns away from criminals only if honest folks will give up theirs. Gun-control
proposals are also an insult. Gun control by definition affects only honest people. When a politician tells you he wants to forbid you from owning a
firearm or force you to get a license, he is telling you he doesn’t trust you. That’s an insult. The government trusted me with a M-48 tank and
assorted small arms when it claimed to have need of my services. It trusts common Americans with all kinds of arms when it wants them to go kill
foreigners somewhere—usually for the financial benefit of some corporations. But when the men and women take off their uniforms and return to
their homes and assume responsibility for their own and their families’ safety, suddenly the politicians don’t trust them to own a gun. This is pure
elitism. . . . Gun control is not about guns or crime. It is about an elite that fears and despises the common people. | |
| Glenn Harlan Reynolds | A 'well regulated militia' was thus one that was well-trained and equipped, not one that was 'well-regulated' in the modern sense of being subjected to numerous government prohibitions and restrictions. | |
| David Rockefeller | Bilderberger Meeting: The world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government... (more) | |
| John D. Rockefeller, Sr. | In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.
We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen -- of whom we have an ample supply.
The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. | |
| Benjamin A. Rooge | 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. | |
| Richard Rumbold | I never could believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden. | |
| Bertrand Russell | Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. Consequently those who live under the dominion of Puritanism become exceedingly desirous of power. Now love of power does far more harm than love of drink or any of the other vices against which Puritans protest. Of course, in virtuous people love of power camouflages itself as love of doing good, but this makes very little difference to its social effects. It merely means that we punish our victims for being wicked, instead of for being our enemies. In either case, tyranny and war result. Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda. | |
| Bernhard Rust | Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation. | |
| Dr. Mary J. Ruwart | Forcing people to be more 'unselfish' creates animosity instead of good will. Trying to control selfish others is a cure worse
than the disease. ... In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. We point fingers at the dictators, the Communists, the politicians, and
the international cartels. We are blithely unaware that our desire to control selfish others creates and sustains them. Like a stone thrown in a quiet
pond, our desire to control our neighbors ripples outward, affecting the political course of our community, state, nation, and world. Yet we know not
what we do. We attempt to bend our neighbors to our will, sincere in our belief that we are benevolently protecting the world from their folly and
short-sightedness. We seek control to create peace and prosperity, not realizing that this is the very means by which war and poverty are propagated.
In fighting for our dream without awareness, we become the instruments of its destruction. If we could only see the pattern! | |
| Friedrich Schiller | No, there is a limit to the tyrant's power! \\
When the oppressed man finds no justice, \\
When the burden grows unbearable, he appeals \\
With fearless heart to Heaven, \\
And thence brings down his everlasting rights, \\
Which there abide, inalienably his, \\
And indestructible as stars themselves. \\
The primal state of nature reappears, \\
Wherein man confronts his fellow man; \\
And if all other means shall fail his need, \\
One last resort remains—his own good sword. \\
The dearest of our goods we may defend From violence. \\
We stand before our country, \\
We stand before our wives, before our children!\\ | |
| Senate Report, 93rd Congress | Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency....Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communication; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens. ...
A majority of the people of the United States have lived all of their lives under emergency rule. For 40 years, freedoms and governmental procedures guaranteed by the Constitution have, in varying degrees, been abridged by laws brought into force by states of national emergency....from, at least, the Civil War in important ways shaped the present phenomenon of a permanent state of national emergency. | |
| Nelson Shields | I'm convinced that we have to have federal legislation to build on. We're going to have to take one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily -- given the political realities -- going to be very modest. Of course, it's true that politicians will then go home and say, 'This is a great law. The problem is solved.' And it's also true that such statements will tend to defuse the gun-control issue for a time. So then we'll have to strengthen that law, and then again to strengthen that law, and maybe again and again. Right now, though, we'd be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate goal -- total control of handguns in the United States -- is going to take time. My estimate is from seven to ten years. The problem is to slow down the increasing number of handguns sold in this country. The second problem is to get them all registered. And the final problem is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition -- except for the military, policemen, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors -- totally illegal. | |
| Nelson Turner Shields, III | The first problem is to slow down the increasing number of handguns being produced in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered. And the final problem is to make possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition ... totally illegal. | |
| Mark Skousen | Here in America, government began as a tool to assure freedom. It gradually turned into a hideously expensive political toy designed to redistribute your wealth and control most aspects of your business and private life. | |
| Adam Smith | The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. | |
| 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 | 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. | |
| Baruch Spinoza | Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them. | |
| Baruch Spinoza | The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others.
No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develope their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty. | |
| Leland Stanford | When money is controlled by a few it gives that few an undue power and control over labor and the resources of the country. Labor will have its best return when the laborer can control its disposal. | |
| Mark Steyn | If gun control bore any relation to homicide rates, Washington, DC would be the safest place in the country. | |
| Josh Sugarmann | Handgun controls do little to stop criminals from obtaining handguns. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people. | |
| André Thirion | For this future emancipation, we have to rule out ideologies that aim at reinforcing the state, the police and controls in general, and at reducing liberty. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. | |
| Royce Van Norman | Is it not ironical that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'? | |
| Gore Vidal | When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the [many] believe almost anything you want, and you can guide them. | |
| Voltaire | To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the
means for all our ends. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | Depression and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market, but by government interference in the economy. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | Those who call themselves "liberals" today are asking for policies which are precisely the opposite of those policies which the liberals of the nineteenth century advocated in their liberal programs. The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial -- that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions. | |
| Matt Walsh | And here lies the great irony. The people who are the most opposed to free expression are the same people who want to express themselves as freely, outrageously, and disturbingly as imaginable. Self-expression is a right that they want to keep all to themselves. The rest of us must express ourselves in a way that conforms precisely to their wishes. They demand that we adjust our language — adjust our perception of reality itself — to meld with their delusions. "Here is the script you must follow," announces the man who refuses to even follow his own biology. | |
| Adam Weishaupt | We must win the common people in every corner. This will be obtained chiefly by means of the schools; and by open, hearty behavior, show condescension, popularity, and toleration of their prejudices, which we shall at leisure root out and dispel. | |
| Doctor Who | You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common, they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable, if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. | |
| George Will | The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality. People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | All over the Union, people are coming to feel that they have no control over the course of affairs... ‘We vote; we are offered the platform we want; we elect the men who stand on that platform; and we get absolutely nothing.’ So they begin to ask: ‘What is the use of voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction.’ | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|