|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|  Lord Acton | By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. | |
| Lord Acton | The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. | |
| John Quincy Adams | But the indissoluble link of union
between the people of the several States of this confederated nation
is, after all, not in the RIGHT, but in the HEART. If the day
should ever come (may Heaven avert it !) when the affections of
the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, when
the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision
of interests shall fester into hatred, the bonds of political association -
will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the
magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies ; and
far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part
in friendship with each other than to be held together by constraint.
Then will be the time for reverting to the precedents
which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution,
to form again a more perfect Union, by dissolving that which
could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited
by the law of political gravitation to the center. | |
| John Quincy Adams | Individual liberty is individual power, and as the power of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation. | |
| John Quincy Adams | Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost. | |
| Samuel Adams | The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution,
are worth defending at all hazards;
and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.
We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors:
they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure
and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.
It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation,
enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us
by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them
by the artifices of false and designing men. | |
| Samuel Adams | If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. | |
| Samuel Adams | And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions. | |
| Mortimer Adler | Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want. | |
| J. Tucker Alford | It is precisely this clinging to victimhood as a means of demonstrating one’s virtue and advancing one’s well-being that has led us into a society in which welfare and quotas are “civil rights,” government handouts are “entitlements,” and payment to girls having babies out of wedlock are “compassionate,” while hard-working, ambitious people are “greedy,” punishment of crime is “oppression,” and an independent thinker who stands for courage and self-reliance is dismissed as an “Uncle Tom.” | |
| Dante Alighieri | For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act? | |
| Saul Alinsky | A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises. | |
| Woody Allen | I call the mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master [and] receives new truth as an angel from Heaven. | |
| John Peter Altgeld | Freedom of thought and freedom of speech in our great institutions are absolutely necessary for the preservation of our country. The moment either is restricted, liberty begins to wither and die... | |
| Henri Frederic Amiel | Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth. | |
| Maxwell Anderson | When a government takes over a people’s economic life it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs. | |
| Marcus Aurelius Antoninus | Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them. | |
| Saint Thomas Aquinas | Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them. | |
| Aristotle | He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god. | |
| Aristotle | To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these
retain their facility when they are too large. | |
| Aristotle | It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. | |
| Larry P. Arnn | Hillsdale [College] forgoes government money in order to spare our students, faculty and administrators the bureaucratic interference that is the price of accepting federal financial support. | |
| Saint Augustine | Give me chastity and self-restraint, but do not give it yet. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him. | |
| Mikhail A. Bakunin | The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights. | |
| James Baldwin | Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. | |
| Hosea Ballou | Weary the path that does not challenge. Doubt is an incentive to truth and patient inquiry leadeth the way. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish. | |
| Judge David Bazelon | Members of society must obey the law because they personally believe that its commands are justified. | |
| Hugo Adam Bedau | Government should allow persons to engage in whatever conduct they want to, no matter how deviant or abnormal it may be, so long as (a) they know what they are doing, (b) they consent to it, and (c) no one -- at least no one other than the participants -- is harmed by it. | |
| Hilaire Belloc | [Heresy is] the dislocation of a complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein. | |
| Jeremy Bentham | As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you – the social reformers – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them. | |
| Georges Bernanos | Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity. | |
| Phillip J. Birmingham | Whatever power you give to the good cops, goes to the bad ones, too. Never forget that. | |
| Black's Law Dictionary | A national government is a government of the people of a single state or nation, united as a community by what is termed the 'social compact,’ and possessing complete and perfect supremacy over persons and things, so far as they can be made the lawful objects of civil government. A federal government is distinguished from a national government by its being the government of a community of independent and sovereign states, united by compact. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice. | |
| Sir William Blackstone | That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution. | |
| Leon Blum | A free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought. | |
| William Boetcker | You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.\\
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.\\
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.\\
You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.\\
You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.\\
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.\\
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.\\
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.\\
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.\\
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. | |
| William E. Borah | Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen. | |
| Judge Robert Bork | The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | Most of the things worth doing in the world have been declared impossible before they were done. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | The most important political office is that of private citizen. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. | |
| Tom Braun | If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom. | |
| Justice William J. Brennan | There is no such thing as a false idea. | |
| Justice William J. Brennan | If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable. | |
| H. Jackson Brown, Jr. | People take different roads seeking fulfillment & happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost. | |
| James A. C. Brown | There exists a “fear of freedom” of selfhood, which makes people want to submerge themselves in the mass and confession is one of the obvious means by which they can do so, for thereby they lose those traits which cause them to feel separate. | |
| Giordano Bruno | It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. | |
| William Jennings Bryan | You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. | |
| James Buchanan | I like the noise of democracy. | |
| Buddha | Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others. | |
| Buddha | Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. | |
| Buddha | The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed. | |
| Edmund Burke | It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare. | |
| Edmund Burke | The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion. | |
| Edmund Burke | It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. | |
| Sir Richard Francis Burton | Do what thy manhood bids thee do, From none but self expect applause: He noblest lives and noblest dies Who makes and keeps his self-made laws. | |
| Samuel Butler | The more unpopular an opinion is, the more necessary it is that the holder should be somewhat punctilious in his observance of conventionalities generally. | |
| James C. Cacheris | The statute mandating recitation of the pledge [of allegiance] is secular because it aims to foster democracy, which is both necessary to the survival of the concept and entirely independent of religion. [...] It is clear in the 2001 [Virginia] state law that no student is forced to accept the beliefs the pledge espouses. | |
| John C. Calhoun | A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks. | |
| John C. Calhoun | Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers. | |
| Albert Camus | Integrity has no need of rules. | |
| David Carr | I was taught when I was a young reporter that it's news when we say it is. I think that's still true -- it's news when 'we' say it is. It's just who 'we' is has changed. Members of the public, people with modems, people with cell phones are now producers, editors. They can push and push and push on a story until it ends up being acknowledged by everyone. | |
| Dr. Ben Carson | The more solid the family foundation, the more likely you are to be able to resist peer pressure. Human beings are social creatures. We all want to belong, we all have that desire, and we will belong, one way or another. If the family doesn’t provide that, the peers will, or a gang will, or you will find something to belong to. That’s why it becomes so critical for families with young children to understand what a critical anchor they are. | |
| E. H. Chapin | At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced. | |
| Dr. G. Brock Chisolm | To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas. | |
| Frank Chodorov | If for no other reason, personal pride should prompt every governor and state legislator to take a secessionist attitude; they were not elected to be lackeys of the federal bureaucracy. | |
| Winston Churchill | We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, Trial by Jury, and the English common law, find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall. | |
| William Kingdon Clifford | All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land. | |
| Bill Clinton | There are a lot of very brilliant people who believe that the nation-state is fast becoming a relic of the past. | |
| Frank I. Cobb | If the author of the Declaration of Independence were to utter such a sentiment today, the Post Office Department could exclude him from the mail, grand juries could indict him for sedition and criminal syndicalism, legislative committees could seize his private papers ... and United States Senators would be clamoring for his deportation that he... should be sent back to live with the rest of the terrorists. | |
| Matt Coles | Two hundred ten years ago, the people who drafted our Bill of Rights decided that banning books wasn't the way to handle disagreements. They thought the best thing was more speech. It is a pity that county commissioners in 2002 don't agree. | |
| Matt Coles | The core issue here is not whether you agree or disagree with the commissioners about gay people. It is whether you think the answer to a disagreement is to yank the words of anyone who disagrees with them out of the library. | |
| R. G. Collingwood | Perfect Freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work, and in that work does what he wants to do. | |
| Anthony Collins | By freethinking I mean the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence. | |
| Colorado Supreme Court | The 1st Amendment embraces the individual's right to purchase and read whatever books she wishes to, without fear the government will take steps to discover which books she buys, reads, and intends to read. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion... In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas. | |
| Auguste Comte | [When] Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology, why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy? | |
| Calvin Coolidge | It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in
some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts....
Self-government means self-reliance. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | Unless the people, through unified action, arise and take charge of their government, they will find that their government has taken charge of them. Independence and liberty will be gone, and the general public will find itself in a condition of servitude to an aggregation of organized and selfish interest. | |
| Andrew J. Coulson | In education markets, like the Asian tutoring industry, top teachers are superstars who get to design curricula for thousands or even millions of students and train scores or hundreds of other teachers to use their effective methods. Quality providers expand and are emulated by competitors, and there is a powerful incentive for meaningful innovation. ... One teacher in Korea’s private tutoring sector made $2 million last year because his web-based employer has profit sharing and he’s brilliant at what he does, so he gets tons of students. That’s what should have happened to [Jaime] Escalante. That’s the sort of success that should greet excellence in education at all levels. It doesn’t because we don’t have a market. | |
| Harvey Cox | It is always the task of the intellectual to “think otherwise.” This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society. | |
| e. e. cummings | To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. | |
| John Philpot Curran | It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private school . . . At the next session you may ban books and newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. | |
| Lisa E. Davis | It is ironic that our government, which has been relentlessly critical of the messages that popular culture imparts to our youth, would seek to silence an artist who uses the medium of hip hop to preach a message of self respect and self reliance to young women and girls. | |
| Salvador de Madariaga | He is free who knows how to keep in his own hand the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | Where are we then? The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a taste for law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true? | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | In towns it is impossible to prevent men from assembling, getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves. Towns are like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members. In them the people wield immense influence over their magistrates and often carry their desires into execution without intermediaries. | |
| Declaration of Independence | The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.— Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world... | |
| Declaration of Independence | We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, ...
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. | |
| Declaration of Independence | But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valueable, and your freedom less complete. | |
| John Dobbins | The notion of editorial independence from ownership only dates back to the 1930s. Prior to that time the media was openly biased and that includes the Press that the founding fathers dealt with. Some of the founders like Hamilton and Franklin had actually ran media outlets that were very biased. You used to have things like Newspapers that openly proclaimed they were a Democratic or Republican or Whig or a Federalist newspaper right on the banner. The concept of an independent and allegedly neutral press was and still is mainly pushed by people from the left who do NOT want anything remotely neutral, but who instead want to make sure those "evil" business interests don't have a means of getting their side aired without it being filtered by their idea of what a neutral press consists of. | |
| James Frank Dobie | Conform and be dull. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | These unwritten amenities have been in part responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits rather than hushed, suffocating silence. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and…the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression and obedience. | |
| William O. Douglas | But our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas; that is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world. | |
| William O. Douglas | Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? | |
| Frederick Douglass | Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress. | |
| 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. | |
| Frederick Douglass | To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave. | |
| Frederick Douglass | I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class. | |
| Frederick Douglass | What is possible for me is possible for you. | |
| Judge Robert Doumar | We must protect the freedoms of even those who hate us, and that we may find objectionable. If we fail in this task, we become victims of the precedents we create. | |
| Wayne Dunn | The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a 'psychological confession' on their part. In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive. | |
| Jimmy Durante | Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone? | |
| 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. | |
| Abba Eban | A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement. | |
| Albert Einstein | Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. | |
| Albert Einstein | As the circle of knowledge expands, so does the Sphere of darkness that encompasses it. | |
| Albert Einstein | Force always attracts men of low morality. | |
| Albert Einstein | He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better. | |
| Epictetus | He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid. | |
| Alex Epstein | America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state that he is born a slave to the needs of others. | |
| Frederick W. Faber | There is a great deal of self-will in the world, but very little genuine independence of character. | |
| David Fathi | Putting free speech behind bars simply because it concerns prisoners sets a dangerous precedent. The court's decision makes clear that Arizona may not jail the Internet. | |
| Jerome D. Frank | To vest a few fallible men -- prosecutors, judges, jurors -- with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J.S. Mill called the "moral police" is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries… | |
| Viktor Frankl | The last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | That is simple. In the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay no one. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | ... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ... | |
| Benjamin Franklin | The States acceded to the Union. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Outside Independence Hall when
the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended,
Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin,
"Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded,
"A republic, if you can keep it. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. | |
| Milton Friedman | The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. | |
| Milton Friedman | The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. | |
| Milton Friedman | Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations. | |
| Erich Fromm | The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an “individual,” existing apart from his group. | |
| Robert Frost | Freedom lies in being bold. | |
| James Anthony Froude | English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on
the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised
democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour
of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family,
each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its
self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own
affairs and think its own thoughts. | |
| Rocco Galati | 19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society. | |
| Galileo Galilei | In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. | |
| Albert Gallatin | The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Men ... should do their actual living and working in communities ... small enough to permit of genuine self-government and the assumption of personal responsibilities, federated into larger units in such a way that the temptation to abuse great power should not arise. The larger (structurally) a democracy grows, the less becomes the rule of the people and the smaller is the say of individuals and localised groups in dealing with their own destinies. Moreover, love and affection, are essentially personal relationships. Consequently, it is only in small groups that Charity, in the Pauline sense of the word, can manifest itself. Needless to say, the smallness of the group, in no way guarantees the emergence of Charity. In a large undifferentiated group, the possibility does not even exist, for the simple reason that most of its members cannot, in the nature of things, have personal relations with one another. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place. | |
| John W. Gardner | Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down. | |
| John Taylor Gatto | Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | What is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves. | |
| Emma Goldman | The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. | |
| Barry Goldwater | A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. | |
| John Goodwin | Freedom of conscience is a natural right, both antecedent and superior to all human laws and institutions whatever; a right which laws never gave and a right which laws can never take away. | |
| Rich Granville | Google, Amazon (AWS), Apple and other elitist “alphabets” are controlled by global entities working in collusion through major stakeholders and executives for the benefit of foreign and domestic globalist agendas and not for the protection of their clients or user base.
Their neo-Nazi ideology proliferates one world governance through technology. It’s a kind of tech socialism mixed with big brother in the cloud along with other mentally unstable ideas. Thus, independence from these ideologies, individuals and companies are required to maintain security and loyalty to our clients. | |
| Wavy Gravy | The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak. | |
| Sir Fulke Greville | Whatever natural right men may have to freedom and independency, it is manifest that some men have a natural ascendency over others. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | Foreign influence is truly the Grecian horse to a republic. We cannot be too careful to exclude its influence. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | But as the plan of the [Constitutional] convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, EXCLUSIVELY delegated to the United States. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms, and false reasonings, is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator, to the whole human race; and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but it is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | [I]t is a truth which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger, when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The attributes of sovereignty are now enjoyed by every state in the Union. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | [T]here is a wide difference between closing the door altogether and throwing it entirely open; between a postponement of fourteen years and an immediate admission to all the rights of citizenship. Some reasonable term ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of at least a probability of their feeling a real interest in our affairs. | |
| Dag Hammarskjold | It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses. | |
| John Hancock | There, I guess King George will be able to read that. | |
| Judge Learned Hand | Words are chameleons, which reflect the colour of their environment. | |
| John Marshall Harlan II | One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric. | |
| B. H. Liddell Hart | Vitality springs from diversity -- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces-alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations. | |
| Caryl Parker Haskins | A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed, it is very probable that, by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached. It is because we do not yet know which of the many competing new opinions will prove itself the best that we wait until it has gained sufficient support. | |
| William Randolph Hearst | Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Goodness without wisdom always accomplished evil. | |
| Ammon Hennacy | Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't need them and the bad people don't follow them so what good are they? | |
| Ammon Hennacy | An anarchist is anyone who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do. | |
| Ammon Hennacy | Force is the weapon of the weak. | |
| Patrick Henry | Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death! | |
| Frank Herbert | If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual. | |
| W. G. Hill | The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians and social workers as ominous and dangerous. | |
| Justice Gregory Hobbs Jr. | When we strip teachers of their professional judgment, we forfeit the educational vitality we prize. When we quell controversy for the sake of congeniality, we deprive democracy of its mentors. | |
| Eric Hoffer | The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor. | |
| Eric Hoffer | When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. | |
| Eric Hoffer | Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity. | |
| Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We felt, we still feel, the passion of life to it's top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from bondage of irrational fear. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | There's nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. | There never was an idea stated that woke men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank. | |
| John Hospers | By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments. The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments, that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity. | |
| Margaret House | Things may be cheaper over the hill, but there is a cost to the community in buying over there, instead of here. | |
| Justice Charles Evans Hughes | While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty. | |
| Justice Charles Evans Hughes | When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free. | |
| Justice Charles Evans Hughes | A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company. | |
| Hypatia of Alexandria | Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all. | |
| Henrik Ibsen | The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. | |
| Henrik Ibsen | The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can ever help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men. | |
| Andrew Jackson | From the earliest ages of history to the present day there have never been thirteen millions of people associated in one political body who enjoyed so much freedom and happiness as the people of these United States. You have no longer any cause to fear dangers from abroad ... It is from within, among yourselves - from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition and inordinate thirst for power - that factions will be formed and liberty endangered ... | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | The priceless heritage of our society is the
unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think
as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism,
and we have no claim to it. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it...No grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections. | |
| Japanese Proverb | If you believe everything you read, you better not read. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [The People] are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people' (10th Amendment). To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to any definition. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to
one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly
the functions in which he is competent ...\\
- To let the National Government be entrusted with the defense of the
nation, and its foreign and federal relations ...\\
- The State Governments with the Civil Rights, Laws, Police and
administration of what concerns the State generally.\\
- The Counties with the local concerns, and each ward direct the interests
within itself.\\
It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great
national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the
administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone
what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | That this privilege of giving or of withholding our monies is an important
barrier against the undue exertion of prerogative, which
if left altogether without control may be exercised to our great oppression;
and all history shews how efficacious is its intercession
for redress of grievances and re-establishment of rights,
and how improvident would be the surrender of so powerful a mediator. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [I]f we can but prevent the government
from wasting the labours of the people,
under the pretence of taking care of them,
they must become happy. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [T]he flames kindled on the Fourth of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The policy of American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. That government is best which governs least. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. | |
| Gerald W. Johnson | We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men. | |
| Lyndon B. Johnson | You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered. | |
| Marvin Johnson | China, Cuba, countries where the only freedoms are those bestowed on a whim by the state -- these countries jail their kids for burning the flag. We do not. America was created around dissent. Our freedom is founded upon the right to make known our opinion without threat of government interdiction -- Old Glory is the ultimate, tangible expression of this national belief. | |
| Marvin Johnson | Patriotism and respect are earned through the substance and values of a nation, not by its physical symbols. By making the American flag untouchable, Congress would be sending the message that approval of our nation is an obligation not a choice. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | The true measure of a man
is how he treats someone
who can do him absolutely no good. | |
| Carl Gustav Jung | A shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. | |
| Justice Anthony Kennedy | The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought. | |
| Florynce Kennedy | You've got to rattle your cage door. You've got to let them know that you're in there, and that you want out. Make noise. Cause trouble. You may not win right away, but you'll sure have a lot more fun. | |
| John F. Kennedy | And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. | |
| William Lyon Mackenzie King | Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit,
it matters not who makes the nations laws. Usury, once in control,
will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency
and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most sacred
responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and
of democracy is idle and futile. | |
| Michael Kinsley | Anything that keeps a politician humble is healthy for democracy. | |
| Rudyard Kipling | The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. | |
| William M. Kunstler | After years spent trying to deal with the effects of COINTELPRO, my rage at the FBI's almost unimaginable evil remains undiminished because I believe that it succeeded in many of its horrifying goals, given the deaths of Martin King, Malcolm X, and other sixties leaders. Since the FBI uses taxpayer dollars to fund its extreme and ridiculous investigations of anyone who expresses dissenting opinions, even resorting to crime -- including theft, encouragement to murder, subornation of perjury, and manipulation of the judicial process -- to achieve its ends, I have always advocated its disbanding. | |
| Lao-Tzu | Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking. | |
| D. H. Lawrence | I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual? | |
| Richard Henry Lee | Why then sir, why do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise not to devastate and to conquer but to reestablish the reign of peace and law. The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast in the felicity of the citizen to the ever-increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repose. If we are not this day wanting in our duty, the names of the American legislators of 1776 will be placed by posterity at the side of all of those whose memory has been and ever will be dear to virtuous men and good citizens. | |
| Robert E. Lee | With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword... | |
| Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | [M]y work, which I've done for a long time,
was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy,
but chiefly from a craving after knowledge,
which I notice resides in me more than in most other men.
And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable,
I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper,
so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. | |
| Pope Leo XIII | It is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of the right order, for a larger and higher organisation, to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies. | |
| Gotthold Ephraim Lessing | Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity. | |
| C. S. Lewis | What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about 'Man taking charge of his own destiny'. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before? | |
| C. S. Lewis | Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species. | |
| C. S. Lewis | The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting? | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from ... the Declaration of Independence ... that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence ... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it. | |
| Anne Morrow Lindbergh | Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me. | |
| Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. | This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized. The people may not know it immediately, but the day of reckoning is only a few years removed. The trusts will soon realize that they have gone too far even for their own good. The people must make a declaration of independence to relieve themselves from the Monetary Power. This they will be able to do by taking control of Congress. Wall Streeters could not cheat us if you Senators and Representatives did not make a humbug of Congress... The greatest crime of Congress is its currency system. The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill. The caucus and the party bosses have again operated and prevented the people from getting the benefit of their own government. | |
| Walter Lippmann | In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs. | |
| John Locke | All men by nature are equal in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man; being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions. | |
| F. J. Lucas | Within seven centuries, [the ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000. | |
| Rosa Luxemburg | Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only -- no matter how big its membership may be -- is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently. | |
| Rosa Luxemburg | Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. | |
| Lord George Lyttleton | To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear. | |
| Archibald MacLeish | There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream. | |
| James Madison | On the distinctive principles of the Government ...
of the U. States, the best guides are to be found in ...
The Declaration of Independence,
as the fundamental Act of Union of these States. | |
| James Madison | ... large and permanent military establishments ... are forbidden by the principles of free government, and against the necessity of which the militia were meant to be a constitutional bulwark. | |
| James Madison | The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself. | |
| James Madison | The people of the U.S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings. | |
| George W. Malone | I believe that if the people of this nation fully understood what Congress has done to them over the last 49 years, they would move on Washington; they would not wait for an election... It adds up to a preconceived plan to destroy the economic and social independence of the United States! | |
| Clarence Manion | The Declaration of Independence is the all-time masterpiece of ideological simplification. There in a single sentence of self-evident truth, the founding Fathers put into clear, easily understandable focus, the broad basis of man's relationship to God, to government, and to his fellow man. | |
| Justice Thurgood Marshall | It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas. ... This right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth, ... is fundamental to our free society. | |
| Jose Marti y Perez | To change masters is not to be free. | |
| 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. | |
| Karl Marx | There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience. | |
| George Mason | All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety. | |
| Robert K. Massie | One of the things that really bothers me is that Americans don't have any sense of history. The majority of Americans don't have any idea of where we've come from, so they naturally succumb to the kind of cliche version that Ronald Reagan represented. | |
| Neil A. McDonald | Freedom is not a fixed and possessed thing. It is a quality of life. And like action itself, it is something experienced only by individuals. | |
| Terence McKenna | If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. | |
| Margaret Mead | My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school. | |
| Herman Melville | It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. | |
| Mencius | To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads -- such is the behavior of the multitude. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to prevailing superstition or taboo. | |
| H. L. Mencken | That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the
prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and
intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are. | |
| Thomas Merton | I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself.
If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful,
a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions,
perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it. | |
| Henry Miller | No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance. | |
| Thomas Molnar | Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind’s totalization may flounder. | |
| Mary Wortley Montagu | I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations. | |
| Maria Montessori | No one can be free unless he is independent...
In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence... | |
| James Montgomery | We fought the Revolutionary War for no taxation without representation, it seems to me that we are much worse off today, because we are heavily taxed, and only the king's corporations control this Country, together with mob rule, of the special interests. | |
| Samuel Eliot Morison | If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.... The beauty and cogency of the preamble, reaching back to remotest antiquity and forward to an infinite future, having lifted the hearts of millions of men and will continue to do.... These words are more revolutionary than anything written by Robespierre, Marx, or Lenin, more explosive than the atom, a continual challenge to ourselves as well as an inspiration to the oppressed of all the world. | |
| Samuel Eliot Morison | If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile. | |
| Christopher Darlington Morley | There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it. | |
| Nebraska Constitution | All persons are by nature free and independent, and have certain inherent and unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the right to keep and bear arms for security or defense of self, family, home and others, and for lawful common defense, hunting, recreational use, and all other lawful purposes, and such rights shall not be denied or infringed by the state or any subdivision thereof. | |
| Huey P. Newton | If you stop struggling, then you stop life. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: `I, the state, am the people.'... Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth. | |
| Albert Jay Nock | Many now believe that with the rise of the totalitarian State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will. | |
| Albert Jay Nock | Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you. | |
| Albert Jay Nock | [T]he State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscation -- that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class -- that is, for a criminal purpose. No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient. | |
| Albert Jay Nock | It is interesting to observe that in the year 1935 the average individual's incurious attitude towards the phenomenon of the State is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the Church in the year, say, 1500. ... it does not appear to have occurred to the Church-citizen of that day, any more than it occurs to the State-citizen of the present, to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance. | |
| Kathleen Norris | In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary. | |
| Sandra Day O'Connor | The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art. | |
| Sandra Day O'Connor | The prima facie evidence provision in this case ignores all of the contextual factors that are necessary to decide whether a particular cross burning is intended to intimidate. The First Amendment does not permit such a shortcut. | |
| George O'Neil | When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves, there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen. "Get shot! Get killed! Get diseases from foreign women who despise you in their hearts! | |
| Rev. Edmund A. Opitz | There is a place for government in the affairs of men, and our Declaration of Independence tells us precisely what that place is. The role of government is to protect individuals in their God-given individual rights. Freedom is the natural birthright of man, but all that government can do in behalf of freedom is to let the individual alone, and it should secure him in his rights by making others let him alone. | |
| José Ortega y Gasset | I am I plus my circumstances. | |
| José Ortega y Gasset | Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without but an equilibrium which is set up from within. | |
| Count Axel Oxenstierna | Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed? | |
| Camille Paglia | It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation. | |
| Thomas Paine | It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those that are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist. | |
| Thomas Paine | But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes? | |
| Thomas Paine | Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness. | |
| Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus | Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature. | |
| Michael Parenti | If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed. | |
| George Pataki | When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | You have to remember, rights don’t come in groups we shouldn’t have ‘gay rights’; rights come as individuals, and we wouldn’t have this major debate going on. It would be behavior that would count, not what person belongs to what group. | |
| Pennsylvania Gazette | The loyalists in the beginning of the late war objected to associating, arming and fighting, in defense of our liberties, because these measures were not constitutional. A free people should always be left... with every possible power to promote their own happiness. | |
| Claude Pepper | One has the right to be wrong in a democracy. | |
| Darren Perkins | I believe that America is the greatest country in history and for good reasons, but America has been changing and not for the better. Our free society has been falling prey to a more repressive system with methods for the increased control of people. The return of groups and individuals to the controlling ideology of Imperialism and Marxism using the structures of Corporatism, Socialism and Democracy. The result is that this nation's foundational principles based on the ideology of Liberty are now in danger of extinction. | |
| Fritz Perls | Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self esteem. If you need encouragement, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge. | |
| Wendell Phillips | A large body of people, sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right? Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right? ... I maintain on the principles of '76 that Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter. ... You can never make such a war popular. ... The North never will endorse such a war. | |
| William Pitt | The poorest man may in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement. | |
| Plato | The worst of all deceptions is self-deception. | |
| Judge Richard Posner | MacKinnon's treatment of the central issue of pornography as she herself poses it -- the harm that pornography does to women -- is shockingly causal. Much of her evidence is anecdotal, and in a nation of 260 Million people, anecdotes are a weak form of evidence. | |
| Judge Richard Posner | I do not know what has caused MacKinnon to become, and, more surprisingly, to remain, so obsessed with pornography, and so zealous for censorship. But let us not sacrifice our civil liberties on the altar of her obsession. | |
| Richard Posner | Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old’s right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble. | |
| Richard Posner | It is the censor's business to make a judgment about the propriety of the content or message of the proposed expressive activity. The regulation here does not authorize any judgment about the content of any speeches. ... A park is a limited space, and to allow unregulated access to all comers could easily reduce rather than enlarge the park's utility as a forum for speech. Just imagine two rallies held at the same time in the same park area using public-address systems that drowned out each other's speakers. | |
| Richard Posner | Violent video games played in public places are a tiny fraction of the media violence to which modern American children are exposed. Tiny -- and judging from the record of this case not very violent compared to what is available to children on television and in movie theaters today. | |
| John Enoch Powell | I will not surrender responsibility for my life and my actions. | |
| Sir Walter Raleigh | A man must first govern himself ere he is fit to govern a family; and his family ere he be fit to bear the government of the commonwealth. | |
| Ayn Rand | There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. | |
| Ayn Rand | I swear by my life, and love of it,
that I will never live for the sake of another man,
nor ask another man to live for mine. | |
| Ayn Rand | Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals -- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government -- that it is not a charter _for_ government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection _against_ the government. | |
| Ayn Rand | Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it -- that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life. | |
| Ayn Rand | The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force. | |
| Ayn Rand | The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. | |
| John W. Raper | We have plenty of freedom in this country but not a great deal of independence. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success -- only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, prosperous, progressive and free. | |
| Dan Recht | If what we read today can result in a subpoena or a search warrant tomorrow, fear replaces freedom. We presented three witnesses who said there would, in fact, be a chilling effect if the Tattered Cover was forced to turn over the information. | |
| David Reisman | The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other. | |
| Alfredo Rocco | For liberalism, the individual is the end, and society the means. For fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends. | |
| David Rockefeller | This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long. We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order. | |
| David Rockefeller | This present window of opportunity which during a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built will not be open for too long. Already there are powerful forces at work that threaten to destroy all of our hopes and efforts. | |
| Will Rogers | It will take America fifteen years of steady taking care of our own business and letting everybody else's alone, to get us back to where everybody speaks to us again. | |
| Will Rogers | Never blame a legislative body for not doing something. When they do nothing, that don't hurt anybody. When they do something is when they become dangerous. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind -- men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others -- men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. | |
| 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. | |
| Rudolph J. Rummel | Nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom. | |
| John Ruskin | One evening, when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said 'Let him touch it.' So I touched it -- and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty. | |
| Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man. | |
| Andrei Sakharov | Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships. | |
| Patricia Sampson | Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward. | |
| Eric Schaub | By a Declaration, Liberty is born.
With Courage she is nourished, and
with unceasing Commitment she is guarded. | |
| Eric Schaub | I am not free until I say so.
And there's a good chance
I am going to have to fight once I do.
Ever since I declared my Independence,
I have had to support and defend it. | |
| Felix E. Schelling | True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world. | |
| Dr. Laura Schlessinger | The Declaration of Independence...is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to 'deny or disparage' other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | What is freedom? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any restraint, to any chance. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | A great step towards independence is a good-humored stomach, one that is willing to endure rough treatment. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Besides, he who follows another not only discovers nothing but is not even investigating. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if, as you write me, you are persisting in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. A god is near you, with you, and in you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: there sits a holy spirit within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our a guardian. | |
| Butler D. Shaffer | The State…has had a vested interest in promoting attitudes that would tend to make us skeptical of our own abilities, fearful of the motives of others, and emotionally dependent upon external authorities for purpose and direction in our lives. | |
| Butler D. Shaffer | Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us. | |
| Angel Shamaya | Liberty's view of the government could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it works, work with it. If it doesn't, work against it. If it works you over, abolish it. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them. | |
| General David M. Shoup | I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans. | |
| Igor Sikorsky | The work of the individual still remains the spark that moves mankind forward. | |
| Richard E. Sincere, Jr. | In a free society, standards of public morality can be measured only by whether physical coercion -- violence against persons or property -- occurs. There is no right not to be offended by words, actions or symbols. | |
| Isaac Bashevis Singer | You must believe in free will; there is no choice. | |
| B. F. Skinner | Society attacks early when the individual is helpless. | |
| Samuel Smiles | Liberty is quite as much a moral as a political growth,--the result of free individual action, energy, and independence. | |
| Adam Smith | The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition . . . is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration. | |
| Adam Smith | It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will. | |
| Adam Smith | By pursuing his own interest [every individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. | |
| Jeffrey R. Snyder | As the Founding Fathers knew well, a government that does not trust its honest, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of self-defense is not itself worthy of trust. Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant of the people... The Bill of Rights does not grant rights to the people, such that its repeal would legitimately confer upon government the powers otherwise proscribed. The Bill of Rights is the list of the fundamental, inalienable rights, endowed in man by his Creator, that define what it means to be a free and independent people, the rights which must exist to ensure that government governs only with the consent of the people. | |
| Socrates | I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world. | |
| George Soros | 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. | |
| Baruch Spinoza | He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason. | |
| Baruch Spinoza | Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds. | |
| Lysander Spooner | If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them. | |
| Casey Stengel | They said it couldn't be done but sometimes it doesn't work out that way. | |
| 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. | |
| William Graham Sumner | | |
| William Graham Sumner | If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation,
I must understand that I can have no other man under my control. | |
| William Graham Sumner | If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control. | |
| R. H. Tawney | It is probable that democracy owes more to nonconformity than to any other single movement. | |
| A. J. P. Taylor | Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history. | |
| The Declaration of Arbroath 1320 | For as long as one hundred of us shall remain alive, we shall never in any wise consent submit to the rule of the English, for it is not for glory we fight, nor riches, or for honour, but for freedom alone, which no good man loses but with his life. | |
| 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. | |
| Hugh Thomas | History suggests that the cause of national decline is, as a rule, that the state in the nation concerned has sought to do too much rather than too little. This applies as much to the Roman Empire as to the Spanish. | |
| Dorothy Thompson | It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. | |
| Arnold J. Toynbee | The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole. | |
| Arnold J. Toynbee | We differ from Tory Socialism in so far as we are in favour, not of paternal, but of fraternal government, and we differ from Continental Socialism because we accept the principle of private property, and repudiate confiscation and violence. With Mazzini, we say the worst feature in Continental Socialism is its materialism. It is this indeed which utterly separates English Radical Socialists from Continental Socialists — our abhorrence and detestation of their materialistic ideal. | |
| Arnold J. Toynbee | The Radical creed, as I understand it, is this: We have not abandoned our old belief in liberty, justice, and Self-help, but we say that under certain conditions the people cannot help themselves, and that then they should be helped by the State representing directly the whole people. In giving this State help, we make three conditions: first, the matter must be one of primary social importance; next, it must be proved to be practicable; thirdly, the State interference must not diminish self-reliance. Even if the chance should arise of removing a great social evil, nothing must be done to weaken those habits of individual self-reliance and voluntary association which have built up the greatness of the English people. | |
| Arnold J. Toynbee | To a reluctant admission of the necessity for State action, we join a burning belief in duty, and a deep spiritual ideal of life. And we have more than an abstract belief in duty, we do not hesitate to unite the advocacy of social reform with an appeal to the various classes who compose society to perform those duties without which all social reform must be merely delusive. | |
| John Trenchard | It's the misfortune of all Countries, that they sometimes lie
under a unhappy necessity to defend themselves by Arms against the
ambition of their Governors, and to fight for what's their own.
If those in government are heedless of reason, the people must
patiently submit to Bondage, or stand upon their own Defence; which
if they are enabled to do, they shall never be put upon it, but
their Swords may grow rusty in their hands; for that Nation is
surest to live in Peace, that is most capable of making War; and a
Man that hath a Sword by his side, shall have least occasion to
make use of it. | |
| Bishop Desmond Tutu | If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. | |
| Mark Twain | We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics. | |
| Mark Twain | We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. | |
| Mark Twain | The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise. | |
| Mark Twain | Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk
this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man
label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right,
you have done your duty by yourself and by your country- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of. | |
| Mark Twain | For in a Republic, who is "the country?"
Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle?
Why, the Government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant;
it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong,
and decide who is a patriot and who isn't.
Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. | |
| Sir Alex Fraser Tytler | A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. | |
| Sir Alex Fraser Tytler | The average age of the world's greatest civilizations
has been two hundred years.
These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complaceny to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again into bondage. | |
| Paul Valéry | Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations. | |
| Laura K. Van Onymous | The media can now wistfully reflect on their glory days of the 1970's when the majority of people actually bought into their bullshit. | |
| Veterans Fast for Life | The soul of our country needs to be awakened...
When leaders act contrary to conscience,
we must act contrary to leaders. | |
| Ludwig Von Mises | The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | This, then, is freedom in the external life of man -- that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows. | |
| Rear Admiral Chester Ward | The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations
is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and
national independence and submergence into an all powerful,
one world government. | |
| George Washington | But if we are to be told by a foreign Power ... what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little. | |
| George Washington | There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. | |
| George Washington | My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: Being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so. | |
| George Washington | My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: Being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so. | |
| George Washington | [T]he policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people. | |
| J. C. Watts, Jr. | My father taught that the only helping hand you're ever going to be able to rely on is the one at the end of your sleeve. | |
| J. C. Watts, Jr. | Too often when we talk about racial healing, we make the old assumption that government can heal the racial divide. … Republicans and Democrats – red, yellow, black and white – have to understand that we must individually, all of us, accept our share of responsibility. … It does not happen by dividing us into racial groups. It does not happen by trying to turn rich against poor or by using the politics of fear. It does not happen by reducing our values to the lowest common denominator. And friends, it does not happen by asking Americans to accept what’s immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance. | |
| J. C. Watts, Jr. | For the past 30 years our nation’s spent $5 trillion trying to erase poverty, and the result, as you know, is that we didn’t get rid of it at all. In fact, we spread it. We destroyed the self-esteem of millions of people, grinding them down in a welfare system that penalizes moms for wanting to marry the father of their children, and penalizes moms for wanting to save money. Friends, that’s not right. | |
| Daniel Webster | There is no happiness, there is no liberty, there is no enjoyment of life, unless a man can say, when he rises in the morning, I shall be subject to the decision of no unwise judge today. | |
| Daniel Webster | Love your country but fear its government. | |
| Daniel Webster | The States are nations. | |
| Daniel Webster | No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country. | |
| Daniel Webster | If the States were not left to leave the Union when their rights were interfered with, the government would have been National, but the Convention refused to baptize it by that name. | |
| Robert Welch | I want for our country enough laws to restrain me from injuring others, so that these laws will also restrain others from injuring me. I want enough government, with enough constitutional safeguards, so that this necessary minimum of laws will be applied equitably to everybody, and will be binding on the rulers as well as those ruled. Beyond that I want neither laws nor government to be imposed on our people as a means or with the excuse of protecting us from catching cold, or of seeing that we raise the right kind of crops, or of forcing us to live in the right kind of houses or neighborhoods, or of compelling us to save money or to spend it, or of telling us when or whether we can pray. I do not want government or laws designed for any other form of welfarism or paternalism, based on the premise that government knows best and can run our lives better than we can run them ourselves. And my concept of freedom, and of its overwhelming importance, is implicit in these aspirations and ideals. | |
| Tom Wicker | If the true freedom of the press is to decide for itself what to publish and when to publish it, the true responsibility of the press must be to assert and defend that freedom… What the press in America needs is less inhibition, not more restraint. | |
| Elie Wiesel | There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. | |
| Elie Wiesel | Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself. | |
| Oscar Wilde | Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. | |
| Walter E. Williams | The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'. | |
| Walter E. Williams | Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual. | |
| James Wilson | The thirteen States are thirteen Sovereignties. | |
| William Wordsworth | Man free, man working for himself, with choice of time, place, and object. | |
| Frank Lloyd Wright | A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him. | |
| Peter Zarlenga | I am thought.
I can see what the eyes cannot see.
I can hear what the ears cannot hear.
I can feel what the heart cannot feel.
Yet I create Beauty for the eyes,
Music for the ears,
Love for the heart.
They, ignorant of their ignorance, call me cold.
Barren of Sight.
Barren of Sound.
Barren of Feeling.
But it is I who am from which all comes.
Given to the ungrateful.
Unseen.
Unheard.
Unfelt. | |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |