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|  Edward Abbey | A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. | |
| Lord Acton | The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. | |
| Lord Acton | Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. | |
| Lord Acton | Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime... | |
| Lord Acton | Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being. | |
| 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 | It is bad to be oppressed by a minority,
but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. | |
| Lord Acton | At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities.... | |
| Lord Acton | By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. | |
| Lord Acton | Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end. | |
| Lord Acton | Freedom degenerates unless it has to struggle in its own
defence. | |
| Henry Brooks Adams | Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself. | |
| John Adams | The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. | |
| John Adams | Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice. | |
| John Adams | The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. | |
| John Adams | Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood. | |
| John Adams | Were I to define the British constitution, therefore, I should say, it is a limited monarchy, or a mixture of the three forms of government commonly known in the schools, reserving as much of the monarchical splendor, the aristocratical independency, and the democratical freedom, as are necessary that each of these powers may have a control, both in legislation and execution, over the other two, for the preservation of the subject's liberty. | |
| John Adams | The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. | |
| John Adams | The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution. | |
| John Adams | Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. | |
| John Adams | Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil. | |
| John Adams | Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil. | |
| John Adams | There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. | |
| John Adams | Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society. | |
| John Adams | But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution. | |
| John Adams | [You have Rights] antecedent to all earthly governments:
Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws;
Rights, derived from the Great Legislator of the universe. | |
| John Adams | Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"… If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference? | |
| John Adams | Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty. | |
| John Adams | Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference? | |
| John Adams | The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws, Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe. | |
| John Adams | [D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few. | |
| John Adams | When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more. | |
| John Adams | Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have... a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers. | |
| John Adams | I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself. | |
| 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 | The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy. | |
| John Quincy Adams | Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom. | |
| Samuel Adams | He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people. | |
| Samuel Adams | A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security. | |
| 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 | Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. | |
| Samuel Adams | In short, it is the greatest Absurdity to suppose it in the Power of one or any Number of Men, at the entering into Society, to renounce their essential natural Rights or the Means of preserving those Rights, when the grand End of civil Government, from the very Nature of its Institution, is for the Support, Protection and Defense of those very Rights: The principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. | |
| 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 | Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble
and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty! | |
| Samuel Adams | The Legislative has no Right to absolute arbitrary Power over the Lives and Fortunes of the People: Nor can Mortals assume a Prerogative not only too high for Men but for Angels, and therefore reserv’d for the Exercise of the Deity alone. | |
| Samuel Adams | Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance. Let us remember that "if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom," it is a very serious consideration ... that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event. | |
| Samuel Adams | All Men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please: And in case of intolerable Oppression, civil or religious, to leave the Society they belong to and enter into another. When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary Consent, and they have a Right to demand and insist upon the performance of such Conditions and previous Limitations as form an equitable original Compact. | |
| Samuel Adams | Among the natural Rights of the Colonists are these: First, a Right to Life; secondly, to Liberty; thirdly, to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best Manner they can. Those are evident Branches of, rather than Deductions from, the Duty of Self-Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature. | |
| Samuel Adams | If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of Almighty God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave. | |
| Samuel Adams | It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. | |
| Samuel Adams | No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can
any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is
preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant,
and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own
weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders. | |
| 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. | |
| Samuel Adams | All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they should. | |
| Joseph Addison | A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty Is worth a whole eternity in bondage. | |
| Mortimer Adler | Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men. | |
| Aeschylus | Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny. | |
| Aeschylus | Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might. | |
| Spiro Agnew | Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression, and the leaders of various media professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me. That happens to be my amendment, too. It guarantees my free speech as it does their freedom of the press… There is room for all of us – and for our divergent views – under the First Amendment. | |
| Alabama, Declaration of Rights Article I Section 35 | That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression. | |
| Donald Alexander | We now have so many regulations that everyone is guilty of some violation. | |
| Dante Alighieri | Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips, but few in their mind. | |
| Dante Alighieri | For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act? | |
| Dante Alighieri | Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds. | |
| Florence Ellinwood Allen | Liberty cannot be caged into a charter or handed on ready-made to the next generation. Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves. | |
| 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... | |
| American Civil Liberties Union | Liberty is always unfinished business. | |
| American Library Association | We believe that free communication is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture. | |
| American Library Association | The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack… These actions apparently arise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. | |
| American Library Association | Why is Intellectual Freedom Important? Intellectual freedom is the basis of our democratic system. We expect our people to be self-governors. But to do so responsibly, our citizenry must be well informed. Libraries provide the ideas and information, in a variety of formats, to allow people to inform themselves. | |
| American Library Association | We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. | |
| Fisher Ames | I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It is the stale artifice which has duped the world a thousand times, and yet, though detected, it is still successful. I love liberty as well as anybody. I am proud of it, as the true title of our people to distinction above others; but ... I would guard it by making the laws strong enough to protect it. | |
| Fisher Ames | Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent. | |
| Henri-Frédéric Amiel | Liberty, equality -- bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness. | |
| 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. | |
| Henri Frederic Amiel | Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means to push back a boundary-line and adding to one's liberty. | |
| 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. | |
| Susan B. Anthony | It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. | |
| Saint Thomas Aquinas | Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do. | |
| 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. | |
| Hannah Arendt | In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free. | |
| Aristotle | If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost. | |
| 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 | Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil -- and if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty. | |
| Aristotle | The basis of a democratic state is liberty. | |
| Larry P. Arnn | ...[W]e insist on the principle that no danger or crisis, foreign or domestic, will be solved by Americans surrendering more of their constitutional liberties, in the foolish hope that a bigger government will provide greater security. | |
| Matthew Arnold | The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next. | |
| John Ashcroft | To those who scare peace loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends. | |
| Isaac Asimov | Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition. | |
| Margaret Atwood | The use of “religion” as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time. | |
| Berthold Auerbach | Liberty is from God; liberties, from the devil. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man’s knowledge. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty,
or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man's self. | |
| Michael Badnarik | The Democrats and Republicans stand at two extremes, characterized by which parts of our lives they emphasize their desire to control. Libertarians reject both extremes in favor of the government leaving control of your life to you. | |
| Mikhail A. Bakunin | Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it. | |
| 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. | |
| James Baldwin | The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | Cocaine habit forming? Of course not. I ought to know, I've been using it for years. | |
| Imamu Amiri Baraka | A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom. | |
| Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac | The tree of liberty could not grow were it not watered with the blood of tyrants. | |
| William Barr | It is easier to run away from a local tyranny than a national one. … [I]f it is one size fits all – if every congressional enactment or Supreme Court decision establishes a single rule for every American – then the stakes are very high as to what that rule is. | |
| William Barr | When the entire press ‘advances along the same track,’ as Tocqueville put it, the relationship between the press and the energized majority becomes mutually reinforcing. Not only does it become easier for the press to mobilize a majority, but the mobilized majority becomes more powerful and overweening with the press as its ally. This is not a positive cycle, and I think it is fair to say that it puts the press’s role as a breakwater for the tyranny of the majority in jeopardy. The key to restoring the press in that vital role is to cultivate a greater diversity of voices in the media. | |
| William Barr | Today in the United States, the corporate – or ‘mainstream’ – press is massively consolidated. And it has become remarkably monolithic in viewpoint, at the same time that an increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change. | |
| William Barr | Although totalitarian democracy is democratic in form, it requires an all-knowing elite to guide the masses toward their determined end, and that elite relies on whipping up mass enthusiasm to preserve its power and achieve its goals. Totalitarian democracy is almost always secular and materialistic, and its adherents tend to treat politics as a substitute for religion. Their sacred mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society according to an abstract ideal of perfection. | |
| William Barr | These developments have given the press an unprecedented ability to mobilize a broad segment of the public on a national scale and direct that opinion in a particular direction. | |
| William Barr | The Framers would have seen a one-size-fits-all government for hundreds of millions of diverse citizens as being utterly unworkable and a straight road to tyranny. That is because they recognized that not every community is exactly the same. What works in Brooklyn might not be a good fit for Birmingham. The federal system allows for this diversity. It also enables people who do not like a certain system to move to a different one. | |
| Alan Barth | The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free – which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state. | |
| Alan Barth | Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions. | |
| Bruce Barton | What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | When law and morality contradict each other,
the citizen has the cruel alternative
of either losing his moral sense
or losing his respect for the law. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | If every person has the right to defend -- even by force -- his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right -- its reason for existing, its lawfulness -- is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws.
On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand
that caused men to make laws in the first place. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted, especially in France. This is greatly due to a fatal desire -- learned from the teachings of antiquity -- that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | What, then, is the law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. ... since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individual groups. ... But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic.
Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle
with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate). | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Life, faculties, production -- in other words, individuality, liberty, property -- this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation and are superior to it. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve... But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | And what is this liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties -- liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, of labor, of trade? | |
| Frederic Bastiat | In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism -- including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense; of punishing injustice? | |
| Frederic Bastiat | And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works. | |
| Harry C. Bauer | What's right with America is a willingness to discuss what's wrong with America. | |
| Dan Baum | The country's first drug ban explicitly targeted the opium of "the heathen Chinee." Cocaine was first banned in the south to prevent an uprising of hopped-up "cocainized Negroes. | |
| Dan Baum | The Supreme Court is steadily eroding the protections against police excess promised by the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. | |
| Dan Baum | It's gotten to where defense attorneys in federal drug cases can do their clients about as much good as Dr. Kevorkian can do his -- quietly shepherd them through to the least painful end. | |
| Charles Austin Beard | One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence. | |
| 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. | |
| Rev. Henry Ward Beecher | Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight. | |
| Rev. Henry Ward Beecher | The tidal wave of God's providence is carrying liberty throughout the globe. | |
| Lyman Beecher | No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy. | |
| Clive Bell | Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open. | |
| Rev. Francis Bellamy | I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands;
one Nation, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. | |
| Hilaire Belloc | Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty. | |
| 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 | All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate. | |
| Robert Bidinotto | Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation to the rest of the society. Throughout history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrificed for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was a moral revolution. It was a moral revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being, his property, his happiness became central to our values, and that is what really made America unique. People came here from all over the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. | |
| James Billington | Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us. | |
| Henry Campbell Black | Liberty, whether natural, civil, or political, is the lawful power in the individual to exercise his corresponding rights. It is greatly favored in law. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | The interest of the people lies in being able to join organizations, advocate causes, and make political “mistakes” without being subjected to governmental penalties. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | Compelling a man by law to pay his money to elect candidates or advocate law or doctrines he is against differs only in degree, if at all, from compelling him by law to speak for a candidate, a party, or a cause he is against. The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands. | |
| Sir William Blackstone | That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution. | |
| Lawana Blackwell | Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery. | |
| Alan Bloom | Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities. | |
| Leon Blum | A free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought. | |
| David Boaz | Maybe that's because guns are sold at a profit, while schools are provided by the government. | |
| Neal Boortz | I can’t think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be. | |
| 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 | As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago. | |
| George S. Boutwell | Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it! ... If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished -- in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad. The American Dream will then die -- on battlefields all over the world -- and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations. | |
| James Bovard | The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur. | |
| Boyd v. U.S. | Constitutional provisions for the security of person and property should be liberally construed. It is the duty of the courts to be watchful of constitutional rights against any stealthy encroachments thereon. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches
and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men. | |
| 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. | |
| Ashleigh Brilliant | I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it. | |
| Norman O. Brown | Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. | |
| Harry Browne | The press is hostile to the idea of liberty. Most people in the press are for big government. Most people think that the solution to anything, whether it's health care problems, education, whatever it is -- it's got to be more government. | |
| Harry Browne | We should never define libertarian positions in terms coined by liberals and conservatives, nor as some variant of their positions. We are not fiscally conservative and socially liberal. We are libertarians, who believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility on all issues at all times. | |
| Harry Browne | A welfare state is frightened of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out. | |
| Tammy Bruce | As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought. | |
| James Bryce | Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions. | |
| James Bryce | I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found them able to indicate a single point in which the individual is worse off in England as regards his private civil rights or his general liberty of doing and thinking as he pleases. They generally turn the discussion to social equality, the existence of a monarchy and hereditary titles and so forth – matters which are, of course, quite different from freedom in its proper sense. | |
| Zbigniew Brzezinski | Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen... | |
| Pearl S. Buck | None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free. | |
| William F. Buckley, Jr. | We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down. | |
| William F. Buckley, Jr. | All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores. | |
| Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton | Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness. | |
| Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton | Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness. | |
| Edmund Burke | They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance. | |
| Edmund Burke | No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. | |
| Edmund Burke | Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist. | |
| Edmund Burke | But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. | |
| Edmund Burke | When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. | |
| 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 | All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing. | |
| Edmund Burke | Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe. | |
| Edmund Burke | Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other. | |
| Edmund Burke | Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none. | |
| Edmund Burke | We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation. | |
| Edmund Burke | Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed. | |
| Edmund Burke | Liberty, without wisdom, is license. | |
| Edmund Burke | The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity. | |
| Edmund Burke | The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse. | |
| Edmund Burke | The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion. | |
| Edmund Burke | The only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle. | |
| Edmund Burke | My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty. | |
| Edmund Burke | The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts. | |
| Edmund Burke | Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. | |
| Robert Burns | Liberty's in every blow! Let us do or die. | |
| William S. Burroughs | Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them. | |
| William S. Burroughs | After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell
wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. | |
| 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. | |
| Sir Richard Francis Burton | The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | Freedom and the power to choose should not be the privilege of wealth. They are the birthright of every American. | |
| Bishop Joseph Butler | The love of liberty that is not a real principle of dutiful behavior to authority is as hypocritical as the religion that is not productive of a good life. | |
| Samuel Butler | He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still. | |
| Lord Byron | The wish, which ages have not yet subdued
In man, to have no master save his mood. | |
| Lord Byron | Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. | |
| Lord Byron | I wish men to be free, as much from mobs as kings,—from
you as me. | |
| John Cage | I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. | |
| 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. | |
| William J. Campbell | Today the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury. | |
| Albert Camus | Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. | |
| Albert Camus | Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all. | |
| Albert Camus | Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. | |
| Albert Camus | Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty. | |
| Albert Camus | Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom. | |
| Orson Scott Card | Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter. | |
| Justice Benjamin Cardozo | The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles. | |
| Rev. Archibald Carey, Jr. | We, Negro Americans,
sing with all loyal Americans:\\
My country 'tis of thee,\\
Sweet land of liberty,\\
Of thee I sing.\\
Land where my fathers died,\\
Land of the Pilgrims' pride\\
From every mountainside\\
Let freedom ring!\\ \\
That's exactly what we mean --
from every mountain side, let freedom ring.
Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains
of Vermont and New Hampshire;
not only from the Catskills of New York;
but from the Ozarks in Arkansas,
from the Stone Mountain in Georgia,
from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
-- let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States,
but for the disinherited of all the earth --
may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside,
LET FREEDOM RING! | |
| Richard Carlile | Free discussion is the only necessary Constitution -- the only necessary Law of the Constitution. | |
| Charles Carroll | Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure (and) which insures to the good eternal happiness, are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments. | |
| Jimmy Carter | The law is not the private property of lawyers, nor is justice the exclusive province of judges and juries. In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect. | |
| Jimmy Carter | We are of course a nation of differences. Those differences don’t make us weak. They’re the source of our strength. | |
| Jimmy Carter | In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted. | |
| Joyce Cary | It is sometimes said that toleration should be refused to the intolerant. In practice this would destroy it... The only remedy for dogmatism and lies is toleration and the greatest possible liberty of expression. | |
| John Casey | The growth of drug-related crime is a far greater evil to society as a whole than drug taking. Even so, because we have been seduced by the idea that governments should legislate for our own good, very few people can see how dangerously absurd the present policy is. | |
| Jonathan D. Casper | The freedom to express varying and often opposing ideas is essential to a variety of conceptions of democracy. If democracy is viewed as essentially a process – a way in which collective decisions for a society are made – free expression is crucial to the openness of the process and to such characteristics as elections, representation of interests, and the like. | |
| Cato | By Liberty I understand the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruits of his Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The Fruits of a Man's honest Industry are the just Rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal Equity, as is his Title to use them in the Manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above Limitations, every Man is sole Lord and Arbitrer of his own private Actions and Property. | |
| Cato | Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech. | |
| Cato | Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing Freedom of Speech... Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech... | |
| Cato | I must own, I know not what Treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason, in the eternal and original Nature of Things. | |
| Cato the Younger | I would not be beholden to a tyrant, for his acts of tyranny. For it is but usurpation in him to save, as their rightful lord, the lives of men over whom he has no title to reign. | |
| Carrie Chapman Catt | There are two kinds of restrictions on human liberty -- the restraint of law and that of custom. No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion. | |
| Cervantes | Liberty is one of the choicest gifts that heaven hath bestowed upon man, and exceeds in value all the treasures which the earth contains within its bosom, or the sea covers. Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable. | |
| Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | The real value of freedom is not to the minority that wants to talk but to the majority that does not want to listen. | |
| Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time. | |
| Edmund B. Chaffee | The majority of us are for free speech when it deals with subjects concerning which we have no intense feelings. | |
| Whittaker Chambers | The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. | |
| John Chancellor | Now the 21st century approaches and with it the inevitability of change. We must wonder if the American people will find renewal and rejuvenation within themselves, will discover again their capacity for innovation and adaptation. If not, alas, the nation's future will be shaped by sightless forces of history over which Americans will have no control. | |
| Gabrielle Chanel | Money for me has only one sound: liberty. | |
| William Ellery Channing | The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot. | |
| William Ellery Channing | The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny. | |
| John Jay Chapman | Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own. | |
| Charles I | The people's liberties strengthen the king's prerogative, and the king's prerogative is to defend the people's liberties. | |
| Alexander Chase | The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened by convictions. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative. | |
| Shirley Chisholm | It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts. | |
| Noam Chomsky | If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. | |
| Noam Chomsky | From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought... Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | I like a man who grins when he fights. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.' | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: 'We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.' | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | We are in bondage to the law in order that we may be free. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law. | |
| Ramsey Clark | A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you. | |
| Justice Tom C. Clark | From the standpoint of freedom of speech and the press, it is enough to point out that the state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them... It is not the business of government to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine. | |
| Henry Clay | All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty. | |
| William Kingdon Clifford | It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. | |
| Bill Clinton | The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people. | |
| Bill Clinton | When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... [However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. | |
| Bill Clinton | When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans ... And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities. | |
| Bill Clinton | The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth. | |
| Frank I. Cobb | This is revolution in reaction, as well as in radicalism, and Toryism speaking a jargon of law and order may often be a graver menace to liberty than radicalism bellowing the empty phrases of the soapbox demagogue. | |
| Frank I. Cobb | The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition.
In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority...
It is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people. | |
| William S. Cohen | Terrorism is escalating to the point that Americans soon may have to choose between civil liberties and more intrusive means of protection. | |
| Hartley Coleridge | But what is Freedom? Rightly understood,
A universal licence to be good. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions. | |
| 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. | |
| Charles Caleb Colton | Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them. | |
| 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? | |
| Benjamin Constant | First ask yourselves, Gentlemen, what an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a citizen of the United States of America understand today by the word 'liberty'. For each of them it is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death nor maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone's right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they or their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is more compatible with their inclinations or whims. Finally, it is everyone's right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed. Now compare this liberty with that of the ancients. The latter consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgments; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them. But if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community. | |
| Constitution for the USA | We the People of the united States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. | |
| Constitution of the United States | No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury... nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb, nor shall be compelled in any Criminal Case to be a witness against himself, not be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. | |
| Alistair Cooke | As for the rage to believe that we have found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on, this seems to me a disastrous sentimentality, which, whatever liberties it sets loose, loosens also the cement that alone can bind society into a stable compound -- a code of obeyed taboos. I can only recall the saying of a wise Frenchman that `liberty is the luxury of self-discipline.' Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty -- and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country -- a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism -- the race is on between its decadence and its vitality. | |
| Alistair Cooke | Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others. | |
| Thomas Cooley | The right is general.
It may be supposed from the phraseology of this provision
that the right to keep and bear arms
was only guaranteed to the militia;
but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent.
The militia, as has been explained elsewhere,
consists of those persons who, under the law,
are liable to the performance of military duty,
and are officered and enrolled for service
when called upon. . . .
[I]f the right were limited to those enrolled,
the purpose of the guarantee might be defeated altogether
by the action or the neglect to act
of the government it was meant to hold in check.
The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is,
that the people, from whom the militia must be taken,
shall have the right to keep and bear arms,
and they need no permission or regulation of law
for that purpose. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | We do not need more intellectual power, we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge, we need more character. We do not need more government, we need more culture. We do not need more law, we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.... If the foundation is firm, the superstructure will stand. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | A wholesome regard for the memory of the great men of long ago is the best assurance to a people of a continuation of great men to come, who shall be able to instruct, to lead, and to inspire. A people who worship at the shrine of true greatness will themselves be truly great. | |
| 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. | |
| Anthony Ashley Cooper | Reason and virtue alone can bestow liberty. | |
| James Fenimore Cooper | Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a free man. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner. | |
| James Fenimore Cooper | Liberty is not a matter of words, but a positive and important condition of society. Its greatest safeguard after placing its foundations in a popular base, is in the checks and balances imposed on the public servants. | |
| Thomas Cooper | The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power. | |
| II Corinthians | Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. | |
| John Cotton | If you pinch the sea of its liberty, though it be walls of stone or brass, it will beat them down. | |
| Norman Cousins | I cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both. Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth. | |
| Steven R. Covey | Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside of ourselves will affect us. | |
| Abraham Cowley | The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves, under whatsoever form it be of government; the liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country. | |
| William Cowper | Then liberty, like day,\\
Breaks on the soul,\\
and by a flash from Heaven\\
Fires all the faculties with glorious joy. | |
| William Cowper | But slaves that once conceive the glowing thought\\
Of freedom, in that hope itself possess\\
All that the contest calls for; spirit, strength,\\
The scorn of danger, and united hearts,\\
The surest presage of the good they seek. | |
| William Cowper | 'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower\\
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;\\
And we are weeds without it. | |
| William Cowper | To follow foolish precedents, and wink\\
With both our eyes, is easier than to think. | |
| Judith Crist | What censorship accomplishes, creating an unreal and hypocritical mythology, fomenting an attraction for forbidden fruit, inhibiting the creative minds among us and fostering an illicit trade. Above all, it curtails the right of the individual, be he creator or consumer, to satisfy his intellect and his interest without harm. In our law-rooted society, we are not the keeper of our brother’s morals – only of his rights. | |
| Benedetto Croce | Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human... No people will be truly free till all are free. | |
| Oliver Cromwell | It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it. | |
| 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. | |
| John Philpot Curran | Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. | |
| Czech Proverb | The big thieves hang the little ones. | |
| Mark Da Vee | Positive laws are tyrannical. One's individual rights -- whether they be life, liberty, or property -- must be sacrificed by the state in order to fulfill the positive rights of another. For example, if housing is considered a "right," then the state will have to confiscate wealth (property) from those who have provided shelter for themselves in order to house those who have not. ... True justice is realized when our lives, and property are secure, and we are free to express our thoughts without fear of retribution. Just laws are negative in nature; they exist to thwart the violation of our natural rights. Government ought to be the collective organization -- that is, the extension -- of the individual's right of self-defense, and its purpose to protect our lives, liberties, and property. | |
| Daily Telegraph | Today, The Daily Telegraph starts its 'A Free Country' campaign. Week by week, and in major individual investigations, we shall examine how freedom is being taken away, whether by Westminster or Whitehall or Brussels or any other authority. We shall try to annoy the control freaks, whether they are Right, Left or Centre, and we shall welcome allies for freedom from all quarters. The Conservative leadership contestants hardly breathe a word about freedom. The Labour Government's Queen's Speech is a shopping list of attacks on our liberties. There's plenty to do. Libertad o muerte! | |
| Alma Daniel | It is up to you to decide whether or not you’re ready to be free, really free.
This pertains to your relationship as well as your activities in the world.
You are limitless, if you choose that! Your freedom comes from letting go.
Freedom means empowerment to be, do, go, feel, whatever your heart tells you.
Only you have kept yourself from having this freedom out of some
misunderstanding of what your responsibilities really are.
Your responsibilities are to your Self. Serve that truly, fully, and you serve All. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. From him who will not give her all, she will have nothing. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. | |
| Elmer Davis | The Republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it ...
This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave. | |
| Elmer Davis | This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle – among others – that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error; that in the competition of the marketplace of ideas, the sounder ideas will in the long run win out. | |
| Honore de Balzac | Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph. | |
| Voltarine de Cleyre | Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license,” and they will define freedom out of existence. | |
| Remy de Gourmont | Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free. | |
| Bertrand de Jouvenel | A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. | |
| Estienne de la Boétie | It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement. | |
| Madame Jeanne Marie Phlipon de La Platiere Roland | O liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name!
[Fr., O liberte! que de crimes on commet dans ton nom!] | |
| Salvador De Madariaga | He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands 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. | |
| Louis Charles Alfred de Musset | Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits. | |
| Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre | The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance. | |
| Vittorio de Sica | Moral indignation is in most cases 2% moral, 48% indignation and 50% envy. | |
| 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 | Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | ... liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | By the side of these religious men I discern others whose looks are turned to the earth more than to Heaven; they are the partisans of liberty, not only as the source of the noblest virtues, but more especially as the root of all solid advantages; and they sincerely desire to extend its sway, and to impart its blessings to mankind. It is natural that they should hasten to invoke the assistance of religion, for they must know that liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith; but they have seen religion in the ranks of their adversaries, and they inquire no further; some of them attack it openly, and the remainder are afraid to defend it. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave. | |
| 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. | |
| Democratic National Platform of 1892 | We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner – the know-nothing fundamentalist right – it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | Our First Amendment expresses a far different calculus for regulating speech than for regulating nonexpressive conduct and that is as it should be. The right to swing your fist should end at the tip of my nose, but your right to express your ideas should not necessarily end at the lobes of my ears. | |
| John Dewey | Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large. | |
| John Dickenson | Indeed nations, in general, are not apt to think until they feel; and therefore nations in general have lost their liberty: For as violations of the rights of the governed, are commonly not only specious, but small at the beginning, they spread over the multitude in such a manner, as to touch individuals but slightly. Thus they are disregarded. The power or profit that arises from these violations centering in few persons, is to them considerable. For this reason the governors having in view their particular purposes, successively preserve an uniformity of conduct for attaining them. They regularly increase the first injuries, till at length the inattentive people are compelled to perceive the heaviness of their burthens -- They begin to complain and inquire — but too late. They find their oppressors so strengthened by success, and themselves so entangled in examples of express authority on the part of their rulers, and of tacit recognition on their own part, that they are quite confounded: for millions entertain no other idea of the legality of power, than it is founded on the exercise of power. | |
| John Dickinson | Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness... We claim them from a higher source -- from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives. | |
| Denis Diderot | To brand man with infamy, and let him free, is an absurdity that peoples our forests with assassins.
[Fr., Rendre l'homme infame, et le laisser libre, est une absurdite qui peuple nos forets d'assassins.] | |
| John G. Diefenbaker | I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind. | |
| John G. Diefenbaker | Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | For you see, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes. | |
| John Dos Passos | Individuality is freedom lived. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging.
It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects
as it passes for acceptance of an idea. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life. | |
| 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 | The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. It is one of the great landmarks in men’s struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized. | |
| William O. Douglas | The right to revolt has sources deep in our history. | |
| William O. Douglas | Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are ... the right to believe what one chooses, the right to differ from his neighbor, the right to pick and choose the political philosophy he likes best, the right to associate with whomever he chooses, the right to join groups he prefers ... | |
| William O. Douglas | A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left. | |
| William O. Douglas | Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged. | |
| Frederick Douglass | Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. | |
| 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 | ... and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty. | |
| Frederick Douglass | What is possible for me is possible for you. | |
| Frederick Douglass | The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. | |
| Frederick Douglass | Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document! | |
| Hugh Downs | I think it might be important to point out that this country is a one-party country. Half of that party is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn’t make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians. | |
| John Dryden | The love of liberty with life is given,
And life itself the inferior gift of Heaven. | |
| W. E. B. Du Bois | The cost of liberty is less than the cost of repression. | |
| W. E. B. Du Bois | The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression. | |
| John Foster Dulles | Of all the tasks of government, the most basic is to protect its citizens from violence. | |
| Will Durant | In my youth, I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order. | |
| Will Durant | Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way. | |
| Jimmy Durante | Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone? | |
| Sir Edward Dyer | O liberty,
Parent of happiness, celestial born
When the first man became a living soul;
His sacred genius thou. | |
| Max Eastman | The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force. | |
| Thomas A. Edison | If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People. | |
| Albert Einstein | Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. | |
| Albert Einstein | A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion
of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting
us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to
us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our
circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the
striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a
foundation for inner security. | |
| Albert Einstein | Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. | |
| Albert Einstein | As the circle of knowledge expands, so does the Sphere of darkness that encompasses it. | |
| Albert Einstein | How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place even I would be an ardent patriot. | |
| Albert Einstein | Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom. | |
| Larry Eisenberg | Free is not the same as free and easy. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Americans, indeed all freemen, remember that in the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Liberty is a slow fruit. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | That which we call sin in others is experiment for us. | |
| 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. | |
| Quintus Ennius | To open his lips is crime in a plain citizen. | |
| Epictetus | Only the educated are free. | |
| Epictetus | Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else. | |
| 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. | |
| Erik H. Erikson | The American feels too rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them. | |
| Émile Faguet | An anarchist is an uncomprimising liberal. | |
| William Faulkner | We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it. | |
| Marilyn Ferguson | We are not liberated until we liberate others. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves. | |
| Victor Ferkiss | Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine. | |
| Marshall Field | If a blending of individualism and of cooperative participation is a prerequisite to a democratic solution of the problems of a society of free men, it must also be noted that an atmosphere of freedom is required if these problems are to be met constructively and as they arise. | |
| Millard Fillmore | Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our revolution. They existed before. | |
| First Amendment in the Bill of Rights | Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. | |
| Andrew Fletcher | And I cannot see, why arms should be denied to any man who is not a slave, since they are the only true badges of liberty. | |
| Abraham Flexner | We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. | |
| Henry Ford | It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. | |
| E. M. Forster | We are willing enough to praise freedom
when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance.
In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee,
we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. | |
| Harry Emerson Fosdick | Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have. | |
| Janet Frame | “For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction. | |
| Felix Frankfurter | It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end. | |
| Viktor Frankl | Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to chose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. | |
| 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 | In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | The sun of liberty is set; you must light up the candle of industry and economy. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | But what madness must it be to run in debt for these superfluities! We are offered, by the terms of this vendue, six months' credit; and that perhaps has induced some of us to attend it, because we cannot spare the ready money, and hope now to be fine without it. But, ah, think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him, you will make poor pitiful sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose you veracity, and sink into base downright lying; for, as Poor Richard says, the second vice is lying, the first is running in debt. And again to the same purpose, lying rides upon debt's back. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | It is a common observation here that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. There is no country in the world where so many provisions are established for them; so many hospitals to receive them when they are sick or lame, founded and maintained by voluntary charities; so many alms-houses for the aged of both sexes, together with a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor. Under all these obligations, are our poor modest, humble, and thankful; and do they use their best endeavours to maintain themselves, and lighten our shoulders of this burthen? — On the contrary, I affirm that there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent. The day you passed that act, you took away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependance on somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health, for support in age or sickness. In short, you offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district - all studied and appreciated as they merit - are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in
their manners. ... Six days shalt thou labor, though one of
the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be
looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase,
and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances
will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring
them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing
all your estates among them. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Where liberty dwells, there is my country. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Trusting too much to others' care is the ruin of many; for, as the almanac says, in the affairs of this world men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it; but a man's own care is profitable; for, saith Poor Dick, learning is to the studious, and riches to the careful, as well as power to the bold, and Heaven to the virtuous. | |
| 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 | Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world
nothing is certain but death and taxes. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Your creditor has authority at his pleasure to deprive you of your liberty, by confining you in gaol for life, or to sell you for a servant, if you should not be able to pay him! When you have got your bargain, you may, perhaps, think little of payment; but creditors, Poor Richard tells us, have better memories than debtors, and in another place says, creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times. The day comes round before you are aware, and the demand is made before you are prepared to satisfy it. Or if you bear your debt in mind, the term which at first seemed so long, will, as it lessens, appear extreamly short. Time will seem to have added wings to his heels as well as shoulders. | |
| Sigmund Freud | Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility. | |
| David D. Friedman | The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations. | |
| Milton Friedman | Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program. | |
| Milton Friedman | I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal. | |
| Milton Friedman | Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom. | |
| Milton Friedman | Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the
vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. | |
| Erich Fromm | If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it. | |
| Robert Frost | A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity. | |
| 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 | I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. | |
| 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 | Freedom is not worth living if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that previous right. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it.
But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless,
whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism
or the holy name of liberty and democracy? | |
| James A. Garfield | Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality. | |
| James A. Garfield | Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained. | |
| William Lloyd Garrison | Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril. | |
| Daryl Gates | We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason. | |
| Ilbert Geis | The most efficacious method of dealing with deviancy is to ignore, to the furthest point of our tolerance, those items which we find offensive. | |
| Jean Genet | Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun. | |
| David Lloyd George | Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired. | |
| Henry George | It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve. | |
| Edward Gibbon | Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind. | |
| Edward Gibbon | In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again. | |
| Khalil Gibran | You can muffle the drum, and you can loosen the strings of the lyre, but who shall command the skylark not to sing? | |
| Henry Giles | Liberty is worth whatever the country is worth. It is by liberty that man has a country; it is by liberty he has rights. | |
| Henry Giles | Liberty is worth whatever the best civilization is worth. | |
| Henry Giles | Not until right is founded upon reverence will it be secure; not until duty is based upon love will it be complete; not until liberty is based on eternal principles will it be full, equal, lofty, and universal. | |
| Josiah William Gitt | Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed. | |
| William Godwin | Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion. | |
| Hermann Goering | Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Tolerance comes of age. I see no fault committed that I myself could not have committed at some time or other. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Legislators and revolutionaries who promise equality and liberty at the same time are either psychopaths or mountebanks. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | He alone deserves liberty and life who daily must win them anew. | |
| 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 | Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue. | |
| Barry Goldwater | A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. | |
| Barry Goldwater | Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny. | |
| Barry Goldwater | I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. | |
| Barry Goldwater | There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.' Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? | |
| Katharine Graham | We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows. | |
| Wavy Gravy | The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak. | |
| Horace Greeley | While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery. | |
| Judge Joyce Hens Green | Although this nation unquestionably must take strong action under the leadership of the commander in chief to protect itself against enormous and unprecedented threats, that necessity cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over two hundred years... In sum, there can be no question that the Fifth Amendment right asserted by the Guantanamo detainees in this litigation -- the right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law -- is one of the most fundamental rights recognized by the U.S. Constitution. | |
| Alan Greenspan | In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard. | |
| Germaine Greer | Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. | |
| G. Edward Griffin | To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism. | |
| Lord Hailsham | Political liberty is nothing else but the diffusion of power. | |
| 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. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice, and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? | |
| Judge Learned Hand | Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands. | |
| Judge Learned Hand | I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it. | |
| Judge Learned Hand | Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no court, can even do much to help it. | |
| Judge Learned Hand | What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it… What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few -- as we have learned to our sorrow. What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias... | |
| Victor Davis Hanson | Imagine the traditionalist as living in synopticon—a suspect that is the target of 24/7 viewing, indoctrination, and conditioning by progressive auditors. In other words, a 40-45 percent minority of Americans is relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360- degree ring of prying institutional overseers.
There is no escape. There is no respite. There is no quarter given. | |
| B. H. Liddell Hart | ...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption. | |
| Paul Harvey | They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here? | |
| John Hay | The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. | |
| Robert Earl Hayden | This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | ...the case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs. | |
| 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 | Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. | |
| William Hazlitt | The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. | |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength. | |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Freedom is the fundamental character of the will, as weight is of matter... That which is free is the will. Will without freedom is an empty word. | |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | The human race divides itself politically into those who want to be controlled, and those who have no such desire. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. | |
| Patrick Henry | It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things, which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. ... 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! | |
| Patrick Henry | It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here. | |
| Patrick Henry | Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect
every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will
preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force,
you are inevitably ruined. | |
| Patrick Henry | The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun. | |
| Patrick Henry | The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them. | |
| Patrick Henry | Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.... O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! | |
| 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! | |
| Patrick Henry | It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace -- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? 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! | |
| Heraclitus | Whosoever wishes to know about the world
must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season. | |
| Heraclitus | The people must fight for their laws as for their walls. | |
| Auberon Herbert | Politics must be the battle of the principles...
the principle of liberty against the principle of force. | |
| Auberon Herbert | True liberty cannot exist apart from the full rights of property, for property is the only crystallized form of free faculties...The whole meaning of socialism is a systematic glorification of force... No literary phrases about social organisms are potent enough to evaporate the individual, who is the prime, indispensable, irreducible element. | |
| Frank Herbert | Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit.
This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security. | |
| Alexander Ivanovich Herzen | The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop. | |
| Charlton Heston | Political correctness is simply tyranny with manners. | |
| George Stillman Hillard | If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor. | |
| Adolf Hitler | This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilised nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future! | |
| Peter Hoagland | Fundamental, Bible believing people do not have the right to indoctrinate their children in their religious beliefs because we, the state, are preparing them for the year 2000, when America will be part of a one-world global society and their children will not fit in. | |
| Thomas Hobbes | Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. | |
| Thomas Hobbes | A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to. | |
| John A. Hobson | The tendency of all strong governments has always been to suppress liberty, partly in order to ease the processes of rule, partly from sheer disbelief in innovation. | |
| William Earnest Hocking | Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure. | |
| Sergei Hoff | Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ...as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities? | |
| Jimmy Hoffa | I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one. | |
| Eric Hoffer | Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power. | |
| Eric Hoffer | Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority. | |
| 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. | |
| Eric Hoffer | The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations. | |
| Eric Hoffer | People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self. | |
| Eric Hoffer | There can be no freedom without freedom to fail. | |
| Abbie Hoffman | Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit. | |
| Abbie Hoffman | The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it. | |
| Dr. Albert Hoffman | I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new conciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation. | |
| Dr. Albert Hoffman | I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild. | |
| Dr. Albert Hoffman | Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preperations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. | |
| Dr. Albert Hoffman | The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience, makes it posible with their help, and after suitable internal and external perparation... to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak... I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug. | |
| Billie Holiday | You can be up to your boobies in white satin,
with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles,
but you can still be working on a plantation. | |
| Billie Holiday | I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music. | |
| Billie Holiday | I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own. | |
| Josiah Gilbert Holland | Perfect love holds the secret of the world's perfect liberty. | |
| Josiah Gilbert Holland | The cry of the soul is for freedom. It longs for liberty, from the date of its first conscious moments. | |
| Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. | |
| Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. | Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. | Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man.
It involves the necessity for perpetual choice
which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. | |
| George C. Homans | The doctrine that man is infinitely tough and resourceful and not easily cheated of his freedom to sin. | |
| Sidney Hook | To silence criticism is to silence freedom. | |
| Herbert Hoover | Honest difference of views and honest debate are not disunity.
They are the vital process of policy among free men. | |
| J. Edgar Hoover | I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce. | |
| Horace | Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself. | |
| Horace | “Painters and poets,” you say, “have always had an equal license in bold invention.” We know; we claim the liberty for ourselves and in turn we give it to others. | |
| Jacob G. Hornberger | Of course, the proponents of political tyranny are usually well-motivated. Those who enacted the gun-registration law in California point to criminals who have used semiautomatic weapons to commit horrible, murderous acts. But the illusion -- the pipe dream -- is that bad acts can be prevented by the deprivation of liberty. They cannot be! Life is always insecure. The only choice is between liberty and insecurity, on the one hand, and insecurity and enslavement on the other. The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government. This is why the gun owners of California might ultimately go down in history as among the greatest and most courageous patriots of our time. | |
| Elbert Hubbard | The man who craves disciples and wants followers is always more or less of a charlatan. The man of genuine worth and insight wants to be himself; and he wants others to be themselves, also. | |
| Elbert Hubbard | There is no freedom on earth or in any star for those who deny freedom to others. | |
| Justice Charles Evans Hughes | Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope. It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.' | |
| Justice Charles Evans Hughes | It is the essence of the institutions of liberty that it be recognized that guilt is personal and cannot be attributed to the holding of opinions or to mere intent in the absence of overt acts. | |
| Justice Charles Evans Hughes | When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free. | |
| Victor Hugo | Liberation is not deliverance. | |
| David Hume | It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how
popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite
safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary
government, and one more safeguard against tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | The ugliness of bigotry stands in direct contradiction to the very meaning of America. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. | |
| Julian Huxley | I believe the State exists for the development of individual lives,
not individuals for the development of the state. | |
| Henrik Ibsen | You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty. | |
| Henrik Ibsen | One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, ‘I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it. | |
| Henrik Ibsen | The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe is a dungeon. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | There will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women -- of free mothers. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | There is no slavery but ignorance.
Liberty is the child of intelligence. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | What light is to the eyes – what air is to the lungs – what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man. Without liberty, the brain is a dungeon, where the chained thoughts die with their pinions pressed against the hingeless doors. | |
| Isaiah | The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to prisoners. | |
| Islamic Proverb | This world is the prison of the believers and the paradise of the unbelievers. | |
| Molly Ivins | It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. | |
| Andrew Jackson | But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. | |
| Rev. Jesse Jackson | America is not like a blanket - one piece of unbroken cloth. America is more like a quilt - many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven together by a common thread. | |
| 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 | The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact. | |
| 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 | Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | There is no such thing as an achieved liberty: like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out. | |
| 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. | |
| Cyril James | A free man is as jealous of his responsibilities as he is of his liberties. | |
| William James | The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. | |
| John Jay | The people are Sovereign. ... at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects... with none to govern but themselves; the citizens of America are equal as fellow citizens, and as joint tenants in the sovereignty. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [The People] are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Were parties here divided merely by a greediness for office,...to take a part with either would be unworthy of a reasonable or moral man. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. | |
| 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 | Agriculture, manufacturers, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessities and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow suffers. Our land-holders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagances. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for the second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse on this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing ... this enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to it's consummation. It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government. | |
| 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 | Question with boldness even the existence of a God;
because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason,
than that of blind-folded fear...
Do not be frightened from this inquiry
from any fear of its consequences.
If it ends in the belief that there is no God,
you will find incitements to virtue
in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise... | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. | |
| 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 | The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave. | |
| 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 | An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely
between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for
his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government
reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign
reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that
their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus
building a wall of separation between church and State. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are only injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions?
Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the
suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that
suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties
might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was
shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases
wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that
operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost
prepared to live under its constant suspension. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for[ another]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | To preserve the freedom
of the human mind then
and freedom of the press,
every spirit should be ready
to devote itself to martyrdom. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | An individual, thinking himself injured, makes more noise than a State. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest dangers to be feared ... We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude ... The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of public money. We are endeavoring to reduce the government to the practice of rigid economy to avoid burdening the people ... | |
| 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 | Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The happiness and prosperity of our citizens is the only legitimate object of government. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands]. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It had become an universal and almost uncontroverted position in the several States, that the purposes of society do not require a surrender of all our rights to our ordinary governors; that there are certain portions of right not necessary to enable them to carry on an effective government, and which experience has nevertheless proved they will be constantly encroaching on, if submitted to them; that there are also certain fences which experience has proved peculiarly efficacious against wrong, and rarely obstructive of right, which yet the governing powers have ever shown a disposition to weaken and remove. Of the first kind, for instance, is freedom of religion; of the second, trial by jury, habeas corpus laws, free presses. | |
| 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 | The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction... I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity... is but swindling futurity on a large scale. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.... If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we counternance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should to rest on inference. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. | |
| 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 | Delay is preferable to error. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Laws provide against injury from others, but not from ourselves. | |
| 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. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [N]othing can be more opposed [to American principles] than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greater number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogenous, incoherent, distracted mass. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. | |
| Andrew Johnson | Outside of the Constitution we have no legal authority more than private citizens, and within it we have only so much as that instrument gives us. This broad principle limits all our functions and applies to all subjects. | |
| 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. | |
| Paul Bede Johnson | Throughout history, the attachment of even the humblest people to their freedom…has come as an unpleasant shock to condescending ideologues. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | They who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | They make a rout about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it. | |
| Chief Joseph | I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian... we can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself. | |
| Carl Gustav Jung | Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. | |
| Junius | The Liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman. | |
| Prof. Sanford H. Kadish | It seems as if the Department [of Justice] sees the value of the Bill of Rights as no more than obstacles to be overcome. | |
| Otto Hermann Kahn | As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny. | |
| Otto Hermann Kahn | The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change. | |
| Immanuel Kant | The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing. | |
| John Kaplan | Drug offenses ... may be regarded as the prototypes of non-victim crimes today. The private nature of the sale and use of these drugs has led the police to resort to methods of detection and surveillance that intrude upon our privacy, including illegal search, eavesdropping, and entrapment.
Indeed, the successful prosecution of such cases often requires police infringement of the constitutional protections that safeguard the privacy of individuals. | |
| John Kaplan | We simply do not catch a high enough percentage of users to make the law a real threat, although we do catch enough to seriously overburden our legal system. | |
| George F. Kennan | Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ... is simply not a possibility in the modern age. | |
| 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 | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain. | |
| John F. Kennedy | I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. | |
| John F. Kennedy | The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people. | |
| John F. Kennedy | We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. | |
| John F. Kennedy | If we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. | |
| Robert F. Kennedy | At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man... is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society. | |
| Kentucky Declaration of Rights - Art. I, Sec. 2 | Absolute, arbitrary power over the lives, liberty and property of freemen exists nowhere in a republic, not even in the largest majority. | |
| Matt Kibbe | The Rules for Liberty\\\\
1) Don’t hurt people: Free people just want to be left alone, not hassled or harmed by someone else with an agenda or designs over their life and property.\\
2) Don’t take people’s stuff: America’s founders fought to ensure property rights and our individual right to the fruits of our labors.\\
3) Take responsibility: Liberty takes responsibility. Don’t sit around waiting for someone else to solve your problems.\\
4) Work for it: For every action there is an equal reaction. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded.\\
5) Mind your own business: Free people live and let live.\\
6) Fight the power: Thanks to the Internet and the decentralization of knowledge, there are more opportunities than ever to take a stand against corrupt authority. | |
| Soren Kierkegaard | People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid. | |
| Soren Kierkegaard | People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element -- learning. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | I have a dream that one day
this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:
'We hold these truths to be self-evident:
that all men are created equal.' ... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | I have a dream that one day ... the sons of former slave owners
will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | It is precisely because education is the road to equality and citizenship, that it has been made more elusive for Negroes than many other rights. The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second class status. Therefore, as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!' | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The nation is sick; trouble is in the land, confusion all around...But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: 'We want to be free.' | |
| Russell Kirk | The aim of any good constitution is to achieve in a society a high degree of political harmony, so that order and justice and freedom may be maintained. | |
| Henry Kissinger | We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing. | |
| Charles Koch | Instead of fostering a system that enables people to help themselves, America is now saddled with a system that destroys value, raises costs, hinders innovation and relegates millions of citizens to a life of poverty, dependency and hopelessness. This is what happens when elected officials believe that people’s lives are better run by politicians and regulators than by the people themselves. Those in power fail to see that more government means less liberty, and liberty is the essence of what it means to be American. Love of liberty is the American ideal. | |
| David B. Kopel | [T]he drug prohibition laws have led to wholesale destruction of civil liberties. The War on Drugs has now become a War on the Constitution, and the American people have become, in the eyes of their government, a society of suspects. | |
| Prince Peter Kropotkin | Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown. | |
| Karen Kwiatkowski | Farce, gross incompetence, and tragedy is the hallmark of big centralized government, wherever it develops. Big centralized government has developed in the United States year after year since the 1930s, and it has both solidified and metastasized since 9-11. Today, we live at the will and by the grace of a dystopian and grasping government. There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades. . . .<br><br>
I believe our government -- outdated, unrestrained by the Constitution and soon to default on every debt it has taken on in our name -- cannot long endure. But unlike those who run and benefit from our modern American nationalism, corporatism and socialism, I do not fear average Americans seeking self-government, rule of law and liberty.<br><br>
That's why on Sept. 11, I will not be celebrating America's undeclared wars on countries that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks 10 years ago. I will not be attending remembrances of victims of that day, because those remembrances refuse to count American liberty, rule of law and freedom of trade and movement uppermost on that list of the sacrificed. I will not attend any program offered by a religious or political organization that seeks to ride a federal government bandwagon to confirm some imperative of war against Islam halfway around the world, or that seeks to promote the false concept of a culture war as somehow God's intent for America.<br><br>
On this 10-year anniversary, I intend to go about my business as usual, and say a prayer of gratitude for the small freedoms I have left. In the afternoon, I'll be in Charlottesville, Va., learning about local apprenticeship and crafts demonstrations. In the evening, I'll check the livestock and gather the eggs. I won't allow what I personally experienced that day in the Pentagon, nor the subsequent government drumbeats for war, waving the Sept. 11 banner, to diminish my awareness of the meaning of liberty.<br><br>
The real battle for Americans today is a battle to reassert our independence from an overbearing and unsustainable state. Today, we can all celebrate that there are fundamental cracks in the federal state's veneer, and we can be grateful for the options we still have in our own lives to live free, to practice charity and faith, creativity and productivity and to rediscover our own power as individuals and communities. | |
| Dalai Lama | Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the entire path. Until you have developed this awareness, all other practices are obstructed. | |
| Louis Lamour | Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom. | |
| Rose Wilder Lane | Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political
structure, of these United States protects any American from
arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the
Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the
torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a
cellar. | |
| Rose Wilder Lane | Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is. | |
| Lao-Tzu | Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking. | |
| Wayne LaPierre | We've witnessed a fire sale of American liberties at bargain basement prices, in return for the false promise of more security... The America being designed right now won't resemble the America we've been defending... The danger isn't that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don't realize that he is already inside the castle walls. | |
| Harold J. Laski | No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism. | |
| D. H. Lawrence | I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual? | |
| D. H. Lawrence | Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves. | |
| Arthur Lee | The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty. | |
| Richard Henry Lee | It must never be forgotten...that the liberties of the people are not so safe under the gracious manner of government as by the limitation of power. | |
| Richard Henry Lee | To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. | |
| Robert W. Lee | It is becoming increasingly apparent that many—arguably most—of the problems that plague our nation have been aggravated rather than alleviated by federal intervention. In one area after another, massive infusions of tax dollars have been squandered on false solutions which, when they fail to achieve their stated objectives, are cited to justify even more spending on other futile schemes that result in bigger government. Examples include programs and laws supposedly intended to reduce racial animosity which have instead heightened race-related tensions; welfare schemes that, rather than reducing poverty, have enticed millions of Americans to become dependent on Washington for their daily bread; federal funding (and control) of education, which has spawned a monumental education crisis; a “war” on drugs which has done little to curb drug traffic, but which has eroded many personal liberties; a health-care finance system that has deteriorated as government meddling and regulation have increased; and a masochistic immigration policy larded with false "solutions" that, while failing to stop the inflow of illegal aliens, have paved the way for further government intrusion into the lives of nearly all Americans. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | Ideological talk and phrase mongering about political liberties should be disposed with; all that is just mere chatter and phrase mongering. We should get away from those phrases. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State. | |
| 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. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Two wars necessitated vast curtailments of liberty, and we have grown, though grumblingly, accustomed to our chains. The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance. Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts.\\
\\
As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good -- anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.\\
\\
I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all. But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way. | |
| C. S. Lewis | 'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'. | |
| C. S. Lewis | A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself. | |
| Liberty Bell | Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.
This expresses my idea of democracy. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | The Shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shephard as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step over the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! -- All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a Thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Where slavery is, there liberty cannot be; and where liberty is, there slavery cannot be. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. | |
| 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. | |
| Walter Lippmann | In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable. | |
| Walter Lippmann | Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right,
the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration. | |
| Walter Lippmann | Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark. | |
| Walter Lippmann | The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth. | |
| 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 | Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society and
made by the legislative power vested in it and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man. | |
| John Locke | Government has no other end than the preservation of property. | |
| John Locke | Where there is no law there is no freedom. | |
| John Locke | Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other. | |
| John Locke | I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else. | |
| John Locke | The Natural Liberty of Man is to be free from any Superior Power on Earth, and not to be under the Will or Legislative Authority of Man, but to have only the Law of Nature for his Rule. | |
| Henry Cabot Lodge | Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin. | |
| Los Angeles Times | Because law enforcement resources have been concentrated on the street drug trade in minority communities, drug arrests of minorities increased at 10 times the rate of increase for whites. | |
| James Russell Lowell | True freedom is to share \\ All the chains our brothers wear \\ And, with heart and hand, to be \\ Earnest to make others free. | |
| James Russell Lowell | And I honor the man who is willing to sink\\
half his present repute for the freedom to think,\\
and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,\\
Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak. | |
| Lucanus | The liberty of the people, he says, whom power restrains unduly, perishes through liberty.
[Lat., Libertas, inquit, populi quem regna coercent,
Libertate perit.] | |
| 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. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | The inescapable price of liberty is an ability to preserve it from destruction. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of government power. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well.
But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way
than the people to fall into the right way of themselves? | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | Institutions purely democratic must, sooner, or later, destroy liberty or civilization or both. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both. | |
| 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. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best? | |
| Antonio Machado | There is no way; we make the road by walking it. | |
| J. Gresham Machen | Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist. | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals. | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | Where the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or of shame, should be allowed to prevail. But putting all other considerations aside, the only question should be: What course will save the life and liberty of the country? | |
| Sir James MacKintosh | It is not because we have been free, but because we have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor age. | |
| 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. | |
| Archibald MacLeish | Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. | |
| Archibald MacLeish | Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man. | |
| James Madison | Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad. | |
| James Madison | We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, that religion, or the duty we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. | |
| James Madison | But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them. | |
| James Madison | Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. | |
| James Madison | Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an ailment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency. | |
| James Madison | [A]ll power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people. That government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty and the right of acquiring property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purpose of its institution. | |
| James Madison | Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. | |
| James Madison | Americans need never fear their government because of the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation. | |
| James Madison | What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2nd it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3rd it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable. | |
| James Madison | If this spirit shall ever be so far debased as to tolerate a law not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people, the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty. | |
| James Madison | It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. | |
| James Madison | The eyes of the world being thus on our Country, it is put the more on its good behavior, and under the greater obligation also, to do justice to the Tree of Liberty by an exhibition of the fine fruits we gather from it. | |
| 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. | |
| James Madison | The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty. | |
| James Madison | What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support? | |
| James Madison | The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable. | |
| Dumas Malone | The fact that we became a nation and immediately separated church and state -- it has saved us from all the misery that has beset mankind with inquisitions, internecine and civil wars, and other assorted ills. | |
| Hiram Mann | No man escapes\\
When freedom fails,\\
The best men rot in filthy jails;\\
And they who cried: “Appease, Appease!”\\
Are hanged by men they tried to please. | |
| Katherine Mansfield | True liberty can exist only when justice is equally administered to all. | |
| Alf Mapp, Jr. | No age is unique in producing privileged persons who can happily dichotomize condemnation of their society and enjoyment of its fruits. The eighteenth century had its landau liberals as the nineteenth would have its carriage Communists. | |
| Jose Marti y Perez | To change masters is not to be free. | |
| Everett Dean Martin | Morality cannot exist one minute without freedom... Only a free man can possibly be moral. Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance. | |
| Everett Dean Martin | Tolerance is a better guarantee of freedom than brotherly love; for a man may love his brother so much that he feels himself thereby appointed his brother’s keeper. | |
| George Mason | To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them. | |
| 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. | |
| George Mason | No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. | |
| Massachusetts Bill of Rights | A frequent recurrence to the fundamental principles of the constitution, and a constant adherence to those of piety, justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the advantages of liberty, and to maintain a free government. | |
| Massachusetts State Motto | Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem
(By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty) | |
| 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. | |
| Matthew 20:15 | Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? | |
| W. Somerset Maugham | There are two good things in life -- freedom of thought and freedom of action. | |
| W. Somerset Maugham | If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that, too. | |
| Giuseppe Mazzini | Liberty, understood by materialists as the right to do or not to do anything not directly injurious to others, we understand as the faculty of choosing, among the various modes of fulfilling duty, those most in harmony with our own tendencies. | |
| Eugene McCarthy | The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency.
An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty. | |
| Neil A. McDonald | Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. | |
| 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. | |
| George McGovern | The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher standard. | |
| 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. | |
| Peter McWilliams | That the religious right completely took over the word Christian is a given. At one time, phrases such as Christian charity and Christian tolerance were used to denote kindness and compassion. To perform a "Christian" act meant an act of giving, of acceptance, of toleration. Now, Christian is invariably linked to right-wing conservative political thought -- Christian nation, Christian morality, Christian values, Christian family. | |
| Peter McWilliams | The purpose of education is to make the choices clear to people, not to make the choices for people. | |
| Alexander Meiklejohn | Freedom is always wise. | |
| Rupertus Meldenius | In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas \\
Unity in things Necessary, Liberty in things Unnecessary, and Charity in all. | |
| H. L. Mencken | I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone. | |
| H. L. Mencken | I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air -- that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own
government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within
the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority. | |
| H. L. Mencken | It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly. | |
| 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 | All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have. | |
| H. L. Mencken | I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. | |
| Dr. Joseph Mengele | The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it. | |
| Giovanni Miegge | Religious liberty is primarily a man’s liberty to profess a faith different from that of the dominant religion, and to unite in public worship with those who share his faith. | |
| Javier Milei | I did not come here to guide lambs. I came here to awaken lions. | |
| John Stuart Mill | If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. | |
| 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 | War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The only freedom which deserves 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. | |
| John Stuart Mill | That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. | |
| John Stuart Mill | A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands -- even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished. | |
| John Stuart Mill | But war, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer. War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other. | |
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | Let us forget such words, and all they mean, as Hatred, Bitterness and Rancor, Greed, Intolerance, Bigotry. Let us renew our faith and pledge to Man, his right to be Himself, and free. | |
| Joel Miller | What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves. | |
| John Milton | None can love freedom but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license, which never hath more scope than under tyrants. | |
| John Milton | The conquer'd, also, and enslaved by war, Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose. | |
| John Milton | License they mean when they cry, Liberty!
For who loves that, must first be wise and good. | |
| John Milton | Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. | |
| John Milton | No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free. | |
| John Milton | None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. | |
| John Milton | Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. | |
| John Milton | The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty. | |
| John Milton | When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for. | |
| John Milton | Nations grow corrupt, love bondage more than liberty; bondage with ease than strenuous liberty. | |
| Margaret Mitchell | Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is. | |
| Jessica Mitford | When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees. | |
| Tim Moen | I want gay married people to be able to protect their marijuana plants with guns. | |
| James Monroe | Let us by wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties. | |
| James Monroe | Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny. | |
| Maria Montessori | Discipline must come through liberty... We do not consider an individual disciplined when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. | |
| 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. | |
| John Morley | [L]iberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving people to think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing. It is the object of a favourable presumption. The burden of proving it inexpedient always lies, and wholly lies, on those who wish to abridge it by coercion, whether direct or indirect. | |
| Norval Morris | The prime function of the criminal law is to protect our persons and our property; these purposes are now engulfed in a mass of other distracting, inefficiently performed, legislative duties. When the criminal law invades the spheres of private morality and social welfare, it exceeds its proper limits at the cost of neglecting its primary tasks. This unwarranted extension is expensive, ineffective, and criminogenic. | |
| Lance Morrow | Zealotry of either kind -- the puritan's need to regiment others or the victim's passion for blaming everyone except himself -- tends to produce a depressing civic stupidity. Each trait has about it the immobility of addiction. Victims become addicted to being victims: they derive identity, innocence and a kind of devious power from sheer, defaulting helplessness. On the other side, the candlesnuffers of behavioral and political correctness enact their paradox, accomplishing intolerance in the name of tolerance, regimentation in the name of betterment. | |
| Zero Mostel | The freedom of any society varies proportionately with the volume of its laughter. | |
| Edward R. Murrow | We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular. | |
| Benito Mussolini | Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power. | |
| Benito Mussolini | People are tired of liberty. They have had a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer a chaste and austere virgin…. Today’s youth are moved by other slogans…Order, Hierarchy, Discipline. | |
| National Press Club | In Defense Of Freedom ... (more) | |
| 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. | |
| Reverend Martin Niemoeller | In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me. | |
| Reverend Martin Niemoeller | When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | People demand freedom only when they have no power. | |
| Lyn Nofziger | One of the things that bothers me most is the growing belief in the country that security is more important than freedom. It ain't. | |
| Lyn Nofziger | These things I believe: That government should butt out. \\
That government should butt out.\\
That freedom is our most precious commodity and\\
if we are not eternally vigilant, government will take it all away.\\
That individual freedom demands individual responsibility.\\
That government is not a necessary good but an unavoidable evil.\\
That the executive branch has grown too strong,
the judicial branch too arrogant
and the legislative branch too stupid.\\
That political parties have become close to meaningless.\\
That government should work to insure the rights of the individual,
not plot to take them away.\\
That government should provide for the national defense\\
and work to insure domestic tranquillity.\\
That foreign trade should be fair rather than free.\\
That America should be wary of foreign entanglements.\\
That the tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time\\
with the blood of patriots and tyrants.\\
That guns do more than protect us from criminals;\\
more importantly, they protect us from the ongoing threat of government.\\
That states are the bulwark of our freedom.\\
That states should have the right to secede from the Union.\\
That once a year we should hang someone in government\\
as an example to his fellows."\\ | |
| Lyn Nofziger | The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country. A better educated electorate might change the reason many persons vote. If children were forced to learn about the Constitution, about how government works, about how this nation came into being, about taxes and about how government forever threatens the cause of liberty perhaps we wouldn't see so many foolish ideas coming out of the mouths of silly old men. | |
| Lyn Nofziger | As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom. | |
| Kathleen Norris | In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary. | |
| Charles Eliot Norton | The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent. | |
| 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. | |
| Phil Ochs | Show me the prison, Show me the jail,\\
Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale.\\
And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why\\
And there, but for fortune, go you or I. | |
| José Ortega y Gasset | Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without but an equilibrium which is set up from within. | |
| George Orwell | If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. | |
| George Orwell | If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. | |
| George Orwell | If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. | |
| George Orwell | The ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle, home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics, he feels himself master of his fate. But otherwise he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. | |
| George Orwell | Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. | |
| James Otis | There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the Law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free, and they have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves so, if they please. | |
| Ouida | Petty laws breed great crimes. | |
| Thomas Paine | I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. | |
| Thomas Paine | Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. | |
| 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 | When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. | |
| Thomas Paine | Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. | |
| Thomas Paine | When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. | |
| Thomas Paine | Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good. | |
| Thomas Paine | Though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire. | |
| Thomas Paine | Freedom had been hunted round the globe;
reason was considered as rebellion;
and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.
But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks,
and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. | |
| Thomas Paine | The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech and practically construct them into syntax. | |
| Thomas Paine | What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated. | |
| Thomas Paine | From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms!\\
Through the land let the sound of it flee;\\
Let the far and the near all unite, with a cheer,\\
In defense of our Liberty Tree. | |
| Thomas Paine | Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. | |
| Thomas Paine | He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression;
for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. | |
| Thomas Paine | The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood. | |
| Georges Palante | L'individualisme est une doctrine qui, au lieu de subordonner l'individu à la collectivité, pose en principe que l'individu a sa fin en lui-même; qu'en fait et en droit il possède une valeur propre et une existence autonome, et que l'idéal social est le plus complet affranchissement de l'individu. L'individualisme ainsi compris est la même chose que ce qu'on appelle encore la philosophie sociale libertaire. | |
| William Paley | Natural liberty is the right of common upon a waste; civil liberty is the safe, exclusive, unmolested enjoyment of a cultivated enclosure. | |
| Tom G. Palmer | [L]et me point out that libertarians defend a tradition of liberty that is the fruit of thousands of years of human history. | |
| Mario Palmieri | Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position. | |
| Justice Theophilus Parsons | If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states, then the juror has accepted
the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered
a power and right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty. | |
| Justice Theophilus Parsons | If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states, then the juror has accepted
the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered
a power and right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty. | |
| St. Paul | For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. | |
| St. Paul | Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | Why is patriotism thought to be blind loyalty to the government and the politicians who run it, rather than loyalty to the principles of liberty and support for the people? Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | What we need to do in this country is make sure the majority of the American people really want their freedoms back again, We have to have people once again believe in liberty, foreign policy that defends America, but is not the policeman of the world. We don’t have the right nor the facilities to throw our weight around and tell the rest of the world how to live. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | American voters should understand that Congress will always find a way to spend every last dollar sent to Washington. Remember, politicians get votes by promising everything to everyone, always at the expense of some other invisible taxpayers. …The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | Times of tragedy and war naturally bring out strong emotions... Sometimes people are only too anxious to sacrifice their constitutional liberties during a crisis, hoping to gain some measure of security. Yet nothing would please terrorists more than if we willingly gave up our cherished liberties because of their actions. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | You don't have a right to the fruits of somebody else's labor. You don't have a right to a house, you don't have a right to a job, you don't have a right to medical care. You have a right to your life, you have your right to your liberty, you have a right to keep what your earn. And that's what produces prosperity. So you want equal justice. And this is not hard for me to argue, because if you really are compassionate and you care about people, the freer the society the more prosperous it is, and more likely that you are going to have medical care... When you turn it over to central economic planning, they're bound to make mistakes. The bureaucrats and the special interests and the Halliburtons are going to make the money. Whether it's war, or Katrina, these noncompetitive contracts, the bureaucrats make a lot of money and you end up with inefficiency. | |
| William Penn | Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants. | |
| 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. | |
| Persius | Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases?
[Lat., An quisquam est alius liber, nisi ducere vitam
Cui licet, ut voluit?] | |
| St. Peter | While [false teachers] promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage. | |
| Wendell Phillips | Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories. | |
| Wendell Phillips | No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents. | |
| Wendell Phillips | Eternal vigilence is the price of liberty. | |
| Wendell Phillips | Liberty knows nothing but victories. Soldiers call Bunker Hill a defeat; but liberty dates from it though Warren lay dead on the field. | |
| Wendell Phillips | Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. | |
| Francis Picabia | A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself. | |
| Everett Piper | History has taught us time and again that political power always raises its angry fist when timeless principles are lost. We know that without the scale of "self-evident truths" grounded in the "laws of nature and nature's God," every culture eventually finds itself subject to the rule of the gang or the tyranny of the individual. Recognizing this, scholars of all ages have confidently given their hearts and minds to the words, "You shall know the truth and the
truth shall set you free. | |
| William Pitt | Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. | |
| Plato | One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. | |
| Pledge of Allegiance | I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. | |
| Plutarch | The first destroyer of the liberties of a people is he who first gave them bounties and largess. | |
| Plutarch | The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits. | |
| Alexander Pope | Give me again my hollow tree
A crust of bread, and liberty! | |
| Sir Karl Popper | We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than only freedom can make security more secure. | |
| David M. Potter | The American notion of freedom transcended the political realm and in fact extended to every major category of human relationships, including those between employer and employee, clergyman and layman, husband and wife, parent and child, public official and citizen. Americans believed that, as of July 4, 1776, all men were created equal, and that any impairment of a man’s equality was destructive of his liberty also. | |
| Ezra Pound | Liberty is not a right but a duty. | |
| John Enoch Powell | I will not surrender responsibility for my life and my actions. | |
| Pythagoras | No one is free who is not master of himself. | |
| Dan Quayle | I believe we are on
an irreversible trend toward
more freedom and democracy.
But that will change. | |
| Ayn Rand | There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system. | |
| Ayn Rand | It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for. | |
| Ayn Rand | The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time. | |
| Ayn Rand | There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. | |
| Bert Rand | Anyone who confuses liberty lovers with nazis or other fascists is waaaayy too stupid (or evil) to deserve respect. | |
| Bert Rand | Any person or any so-called 'political spectrum' that equates live-and-let-livers with control freaks is even more evil than the worst control freaks themselves. | |
| Edmund Randolph | The general object was to produce a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origins, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy. | |
| John W. Raper | We have plenty of freedom in this country but not a great deal of independence. | |
| Leonard E. Read | It is incorrect to think of liberty as synonymous with unrestrained action. Liberty does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the liberty of a single human being. To argue contrarily is to claim that liberty can be composed of liberty negations, patently absurd. Unrestraint carried to the point of impairing the liberty of others is the exercise of license, not liberty. To minimize the exercise of license is to maximize the area of liberty. Ideally, government would restrain license, not indulge in it; make it difficult, not easy; disgraceful, not popular. A government that does otherwise is licentious, not liberal. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Man is not free unless government is limited.... As government expands, liberty contracts. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: 'We the people.' 'We the people' tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. 'We the people' are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which 'We the people' tell the government what it is allowed to do. 'We the people' are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years. | |
| Ronald Reagan | If history teaches us anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. It´s so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world. | |
| Ronald Reagan | An informed patriotism is what we want. | |
| Ronald Reagan | If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals -- if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is. | |
| Ronald Reagan | I just wanted to speak to you about something from the Internal Revenue Code. It is the last sentence of section 509A of the code and it reads: 'For purposes of paragraph 3, an organization described in paragraph 2 shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501C-4, 5, or 6, which would be described in paragraph 2 if it were an organization described in section 501C-3.' And that's just one sentence out of those fifty-seven feet of books. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. | |
| Ronald Reagan | When you start talking about government as 'we' instead of 'they,' you have been in office too long. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Republicans believe the best way to assure prosperity is to generate more jobs. The Democrats believe in more welfare. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Nations crumble from within when the citizenry asks of government those things which the citizenry might better provide for itself. ... [I] hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Tyranny, like fog in the well known poem, often creeps in silently 'on little cat feet.' | |
| Ronald Reagan | We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. | |
| Thomas B. Reed | One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation. | |
| John P. Reid | Restraint of government is the true liberty and freedom of the people. | |
| Rhode Island Declaration of Rights Article I, Section I | The constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. | |
| Cardinal Richelieu | If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him. | |
| Sheldon Richman | It is embarrassing to have to remind people of this in the United States of America. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson singled out three natural rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The last phrase, appearing instead of "property," has prompted much discussion. I cannot say what Jefferson was thinking. But here's a plausible theory: Property is already implicit in liberty. If you are free, you can use your belongings as you see fit. But by specifying the pursuit of happiness Jefferson might have been pointing out that the blessing of liberty need not be justified through selfless service to others. One's life and happiness on earth are justification enough. | |
| Henry Martyn Robert | Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of liberty. | |
| 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. | |
| Will Rogers | A Country can get more real joy out of just Hollering for their Freedom than they can if they get it. | |
| Will Rogers | Ammunition beats persuasion when you are looking for freedom. | |
| Will Rogers | I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat. | |
| Will Rogers | Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches. | |
| Will Rogers | The difference between death and taxes is death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets. | |
| Will Rogers | There is good news from Washington today. The Congress is deadlocked and can't act. | |
| Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland | O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name! | |
| George L. Roman | I am convinced that we can do to guns what we've done to drugs: create a multi-billion dollar underground market over which we have absolutely no control. | |
| Eleanor Roosevelt | We do not move forward by curtailing people’s liberty because we are afraid of what they may do or say. | |
| 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 | I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. | |
| Murray N. Rothbard | There can be no truly moral choice unless that choice is made in freedom; similarly, there can be no really firmly grounded and consistent defense of freedom unless that defense is rooted in moral principle. In concentrating on the ends of choice, the conservative, by neglecting the conditions of choice, loses that very morality of conduct with which he is so concerned. And the libertarian, by concentrating only on the means, or conditions, of choice and ignoring the ends, throws away an essential moral defense of his own position. | |
| Mayer Amschel Rothschild | Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | There is no subjugation so perfect as that which keeps the appearance of freedom for in that way one captures volition itself. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. | |
| Kenneth W. Royce | Liberty is not a cruise ship full of pampered passengers. Liberty is a man-of-war, and we are all crew. | |
| Dr. Benjamin Rush | Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights | |
| Dr. Benjamin Rush | Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us. | |
| 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. | |
| John Ruskin | Wise laws and just restraints are to a noble nation not chains, but chains of mail, -- strength and defense, though something of an incumbrance. | |
| John Ruskin | That treacherous phantom which men call Liberty. | |
| Bertrand Russell | It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. | |
| Bertrand Russell | Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure. | |
| Bertrand Russell | When the state intervenes to insure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favor of that doctrine. | |
| Walt Rustow | It is in the American interest to put an end to Nationhood.
That is the goal in global government.
America must get out of the United Nations or our sovereign Republic will not survive. | |
| Raymond Ruye | ... real anarchism, feasible and actual, as opposed to mere emotional statements, is simply the [classical] liberal economy, and everything that goes with it: political democracy, civil (and not only civic) liberty, free, unsubsidized, unplanned culture. It is only the liberal economy that can favor the "withering away of the state" and of politics – their withering away or at least their limitation; centralized socialism cannot achieve this. | |
| Carl Sagan | One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) | |
| Carl Sagan | Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along. | |
| 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. | |
| Sallust | Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master. | |
| Patricia Sampson | Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward. | |
| Jean-Paul Sartre | Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. | |
| Jean-Paul Sartre | Man is condemned to be free. | |
| Girolamo Savonarola | Do you wish to be free? Then above all things, love God, love your neighbor, love one another, love the common weal; then you will have true liberty. | |
| French Saying | Laissez-nous faire, laissez-nous passer. Le monde va de lui meme.
(Let us do, leave us alone. The world runs by itself.) | |
| John Scharr | Surely a large part of the zealous repression of radical protest in America has its roots in the fact that millions of men who are apparently “insiders” know how vulnerable the system is because they know how ambiguous their own attachments to it are. The slightest challenge exposes the fragile foundations of legitimacy of the state. | |
| Eric Schaub | Americans find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another. America is the land of the free and home of the brave -- we don't need a Patriot Act, because we are already patriots. We know freedom means responsibility, but I am not sure Congress and its domestic enforcement agencies do. More often than not, new security measures enacted by the government have resulted in more violations of the citizenry than terrorists have ever done. The terrorists want us to be afraid -- well, we are not afraid. Stop wasting dollars on this program -- it is not good for America. To give up essential liberty for a little security provides neither. The right to be left alone from government intrusion is the beginning of all freedoms. | |
| Eric Schaub | Freedom is risky.
Nature makes no promises. | |
| Eric Schaub | When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires. | |
| Eric Schaub | Freedom has never been free.
Sometimes it costs everything you've got. | |
| Eric Schaub | Standing up to a tyrant
has always been illegal and dangerous.
There is no guarantee but one --
to not live like a slave,
nor to die like one. | |
| Eric Schaub | Life is a gift. Freedom is a responsibility. | |
| Eric Schaub | By a Declaration, Liberty is born.
With Courage she is nourished, and
with unceasing Commitment she is guarded. | |
| Eric Schaub | The process of liberation is continuous. | |
| 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. | |
| Eric Schaub | The truth doesn't sell. It is high in supply, but low in demand. | |
| Eric Schaub | The 'strength' of the People becomes weak when we don't 'exercise' our rights. | |
| Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. | Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue... | |
| Bruce Schneier | It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state. | |
| Edwin M. Schur | [When a victimless criminal] is treated as an enemy of society, he almost necessarily becomes one. Forced into criminal acts, immersed in underworld-related supply networks, and ever-conscious of the need to evade the police, his outlooks as well as behavior become more and more anti-social. | |
| Carl Schurz | If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other. | |
| Carl Schurz | From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own. | |
| Second Monument to Shays' Rebellion | True Liberty and Justice may require resistance to law . | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Freedom can't be kept for nothing. If you set a high value on liberty, you must set a low value on everything else. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two. | |
| Butler D. Shaffer | Our lack of constant awareness has also permitted us to accept definitions of freedom that are not necessarily consistent with the actuality of being free. Because we have learned to confuse the word with the reality the word seeks to describe, our vocabulary has become riddled with distorted and contradictory meanings smuggled into the language. | |
| William Shakespeare | Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. | |
| 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. | |
| Adi Shankaracharya | Loud speech, profusion of words, and possessing skillfulness in expounding scriptures are merely for the enjoyment of the learned. They do not lead to liberation. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | If you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you may as well not say it at all because people will not trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure time for freedom than unconventionality does. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. | |
| Henry Wheeler Shaw | Liberty, like chastity, once lost, can never be regained in its original purity. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | [A]nd obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men and of the human frame, A mechanized automaton. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Power, like a desolating pestilence,\\
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,\\
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,\\
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame,\\
A mechanized automaton. | |
| Morris Sheppard | There is as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment as there is for a humming-bird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail. | |
| John Sherman | The few who could understand the system will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of the people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests. | |
| Solomon Short | Truth never tranquilizes. The defining property of truth is its ability to disturb. Jesus only told half the story. The truth 'will' set you free. But, first it's going to piss you off. | |
| Algernon Sidney | If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established. | |
| Ignazio Silone | Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying “No” to any authority -- literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political. | |
| William Gilmore Simms | The only rational liberty is that which is born of subjection, reared in the fear of God and the love of man. | |
| Alan K. Simpson | There is no 'slippery slope' toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders. | |
| 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. | |
| Samuel Smiles | Liberty is quite as much a moral as a political growth,--the result of free individual action, energy, and independence. | |
| Adam Smith | Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men. | |
| 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. | |
| L. Neil Smith | People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work. | |
| Rev. Samuel Francis Smith | My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died!
Land of the Pilgrims' pride!
From ev'ry mountainside,
Let freedom ring! | |
| C. P. Snow | No one is fit to be trusted with power. ... No one. ... Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of. ... And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate. | |
| Jeffrey R. Snyder | To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom with more than mere words, and to stand outside the state’s totalitarian reach. | |
| Joseph Sobran | If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion. | |
| Joseph Sobran | Liberals have a new wish every time their latest wish is granted. Conservatives should make them spell out their principles and ideals. Instead of doing this, conservatives allow liberals to pursue incremental goals without revealing their ultimate destination. So, thanks to the negligence of their opponents, liberals control the terms of every debate by always demanding 'more' while never defining 'enough.' The predictable result is that they always get more, and it's never enough. | |
| Joseph Sobran | The attempt to silence a man is the greatest honour you can bestow on him. It means that you recognise his superiority to yourself. | |
| Frederick Soddy | The whole profit of the issuance of money has provided the capital of the great banking business as it exists today. Starting with nothing whatever of their own, they have got the whole world into their debt irredeemably, by a trick. This money comes into existence every time the banks 'lend' and disappears every time the debt is repaid to them. So that if industry tries to repay, the money of the nation disappears. This is what makes prosperity so 'dangerous' as it destroys money just when it is most needed and precipitates a slump. There is nothing left now for us but to get ever deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money the nation requires for its expansion and growth. An honest money system is the only alternative. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State. | |
| Thomas Sowell | We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it. | |
| Thomas Sowell | If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today. | |
| Thomas Sowell | Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. | |
| Gerry Spence | While birds can fly, only humans can argue. Argument is the affirmation of our being. It is the principal instrument of human intercourse. Without argument the species would perish.\\
As a subtle suggestion, it is the means by which we aid another.\\
As a warning, it steers us from danger.\\
As exposition, it teaches.\\
As an expression of creativity, it is the gift of ourselves.\\
As a protest, it struggles for justice.\\
As a reasoned dialogue, it resolves disputes.\\
As an assertion of self, it engenders respect.\\
As an entreaty of love, it expresses our devotion\\
As a plea, it generates mercy.\\
As charismatic oration it moves multitudes and changes history.\\
We must argue -- to help, to warn, to lead, to love, to create, to learn, to enjoy justice, to be. | |
| Herbert Spencer | If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making? | |
| Herbert Spencer | Liberty is not the right of one, but of all. | |
| Baruch Spinoza | He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason. | |
| Baruch Spinoza | The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others.
No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develope their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty. | |
| Lysander Spooner | If, then, it became so difficult, so nearly impossible, in most cases, to determine what is, and what is not, vice; and especially if it be so difficult, in nearly all cases, to determine where virtue ends, and vice begins; and if these questions, which no one can really and truly determine for anybody but himself, are not to be left free and open for experiment by all, each person is deprived of the highest of all his rights as a human being, to wit: his right to inquire, investigate, reason, try experiments, judge, and ascertain for himself, what is, to him,virtue, and what is, to him, vice; in other words: what, on the whole, conduces to his happiness, and what, on the whole, tends to his unhappiness. If this great right is not to be left free and open to all, then each man’s whole right, as a reasoning human being, to "liberty and the pursuit of happiness," is denied him. | |
| Lysander Spooner | If those persons, who fancy themselves gifted with both the power and the right to define and punish other men’s vices, would but turn their thoughts inwardly, they would probably find that they have a great work to do at home; and that, when that shall have been completed, they will be little disposed to do more towards correcting the vices of others, than simply to give to others the results of their experience and observation. | |
| Lysander Spooner | [T]he only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in keeping their money in their own pockets ... | |
| Charles T. Sprading | And here is the difference between the Libertarians and the Authoritarians: the latter have no confidence in liberty; they believe in compelling people to be good, assuming that people are totally depraved; the former believe in letting people be good, and maintain that humanity grows better and better as it gains more and more liberty. If Libertarians were merely to ask that liberty be tried in any one of the other fields of human expression they would meet the same opposition as their pioneer predecessors; but such is their confidence in the advantages of liberty that they demand, not that it be tried in one more instance only, but that it be universally adopted. | |
| Charles T. Sprading | The first great struggle for liberty was in the realm of thought. The libertarians reasoned that freedom of thought would be good for mankind; it would promote knowledge, and increased knowledge would advance civilization. But the authoritarians protested that freedom of thought would be dangerous, that people would think wrong, that a few were divinely appointed to think for the people. | |
| Charles Sprague | Behold! in Liberty's unclouded blaze\\
We lift our heads, a race of other days. | |
| Harold E. Stassen | Government is like fire. If it is kept within bounds and under the control of the people, it contributes to the welfare of all. But if it gets out of place, if it gets too big and out of control, it destroys the happiness and even the lives of the people. | |
| Shelby Steele | Freedom always carries a burden of proof, always throws us back on ourselves. | |
| John Steinbeck | And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. | |
| Casey Stengel | They said it couldn't be done but sometimes it doesn't work out that way. | |
| Adlai E. Stevenson II | My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. | |
| Jimmy Stewart | Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in history text books. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | The right to enjoy property without unlawful deprivation, no less that the right to speak out or the right to travel is, in truth, a “personal” right. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | The dichotomy between personal liberties and property rights is a false one. Property does not have rights. People have rights... . In fact, a fundamental interdependence exists between the personal right to liberty and the personal right in property. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it’s invalid on its face. | |
| Justice Joseph Story | This provision (the 4th Amendment) speaks for itself. Its plain object is to secure the perfect enjoyment of that great right of the common law, that a man's house shall be his own castle, privileged against all civil and military intrusion. | |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe | The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible
without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty. | |
| Henry St. John | Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society. | |
| Charles Sumner | Give me the centralism of liberty; give me the imperialism of equal rights. | |
| 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. | |
| Supreme Court of the United States | Constitutional rights may not be infringed simply because the majority of the people choose that they be. | |
| Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine | Liberty must be a mighty thing; for by it God punishes and rewards nations. | |
| Jonathan Swift | Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can. | |
| Thomas Szasz | The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.'
But maybe you should if it prevents you from feeding yourself. | |
| Albert Szent-Gyorgi | Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought. | |
| Cornelius Tacitus | [That form of] eloquence, the foster-child of licence, which fools call liberty.
[Lat., Eloquentia, alumna licentiae, quam stulti libertatem vocabant.] | |
| Cornelius Tacitus | Liberty is given by nature even to mute animals.
[Lat., Liberatem natura etiam mutis animalibus datam.] | |
| William Howard Taft | Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority. | |
| William Howard Taft | Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race. | |
| A. J. P. Taylor | Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history. | |
| Tecumseh | Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.\\
Trouble no one about his religion.\\
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.\\
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.\\
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.\\
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.\\
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.\\
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.\\
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. \\
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.\\
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.\\
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.\\
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home. | |
| Mother Teresa | Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or sovereign. ... You must weep that your own government, at present, seems blind to this truth. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | Perhaps I can summarise it best by saying this -- Nations that have pursued equality, like the Iron Curtain countries, I think have finished up with neither equality, nor liberty. Nations, which like us, in the past have pursued liberty, as a fundamental objective, extending it to all, have finished up with liberty, human dignity, and far fewer inequalities than other people. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | Liberty, human dignity, a higher standard of living is fundamental. And, steadily, I think, people are beginning to realise that you don't have those things unless you have a pretty large private enterprise sector. Any Iron Curtain country has neither liberty, nor a very high standard of living. The two things go, economic and political freedom, go together. I've been right in the forefront of saying that, here, in the States, and it's very interesting to me now, to see a number of articles from people who are taking up the same theme. They are disturbed that Socialism is reducing liberty and freedom for ordinary people, and that's really what matters. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | Look, I think you're tackling public expenditure from the wrong end, if I might say so. Why don't you look at it as any housewife has to look at it? She has to look at her expenditure every week or every month, according to what she can afford to spend, and if she overspends one week or month, she's got to economise the next. Now governments really ought to look at it from the viewpoint of "What can we afford to spend?" They've already put up taxes, and yet the taxes they collect are not enough for the tremendous amount they're spending. They're having to borrow to a greater extent than ever before, and future generations will have to repay. Now, if anyone tells me that a Chancellor of the [Denis Healey] Exchequer can put up public expenditure in two years by -- and it's a tremendous figure -- twenty thousand million pounds, and he doesn't know where to get it down by about three thousand million pounds, then he ought never to have been in charge of the nation's finances ... never! | |
| Margaret Thatcher | I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | But don't forget that we fought a 1974 election on saying really that pay couldn't go on going up as it was. The important thing … you must never look at pay on its own, what you've got to look at is pay in relation to the amount produced. It's when those two get badly out of line that you get inflation. And now obviously, we've got very much higher pay, but we're producing less than we were in 1970, so it's the relationship that you've got to watch. Don't look at pay separately. Once you start to cut off a man's pay from the fruits of his labour, he will inevitably feel enormous resentment. If he's going to work harder, of course he deserves more pay, and he doesn't want it all taken away in tax. But there are two sides of the equation you've got to look at. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | America, my friends, is the only country in the world actually founded on liberty -- the only one. People went to America to be free. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | I'm never quite sure what you mean by consensus politics. I believe that what most people want in their lives, is what the Conservative Party wants to have for them. I believe that our policies are fundamentally common sense policies. Just let's take taxation for an example. Wherever I go I hear enormous resentment about the amount which people are paying out of their own pay packet in tax. And, this goes right across the income ranges. Socialism started by saying it was going to tax the rich, very rapidly it was taxing the middle income groups. Now, it's taxing people quite highly with incomes way below average and pensioners with incomes way below average. You look at the figure on the beginning of a pay slip, sometimes it can look quite high, look along the slip to the other end, and see how many deductions you've had off, those deductions have increased enormously under Socialism ...
Public expenditure, which they always boast about, is financed out of the pay packet in our pockets. People are saying that they really think too much is being taken out of the pay packet for someone to spend on their behalf, and they'd rather be left with more, and it's now well-known that Socialist Governments put up taxes and Conservative Governments take them down. It's part of our fundamental belief giving the people more choice to spend their own money in their own way. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | Jobs really come in the productive sector of the economy. The real jobs are where people are producing goods or services which other people will buy. Now, dependent on those people producing those goods, are a lot of others in the public sector. Now if you run up the public sector, you can only do it by draining money out of industry and commerce. But that's where the jobs are. And one of the reasons why you have to cut public expenditure is to get the money back out of the public sector, into industry and commerce, so that they, in fact, can invest, and improve, and expand; because that's where the secure jobs are. | |
| Margaret Thatcher | The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom. | |
| The Holy Bible | For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. | |
| The Holy Bible | Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. | |
| The Holy Bible | While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage. | |
| The Holy Bible | Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. | |
| The Holy Bible | So shall I keep thy law continually for ever and ever. And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts. | |
| The Holy Bible | But ye turned and polluted my name, and caused every man his servant, and every man his handmaid, whom he had set at liberty at their pleasure, to return, and brought them into subjection, to be unto you for servants and for handmaids. | |
| The Holy Bible | Therefore thus saith the Lord; Ye have not hearkened unto me, in proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbour: behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth. | |
| Justice Clarence Thomas | I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights. | |
| Lewis Thomas | We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people; we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other. | |
| Dorothy Thompson | When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered. | |
| Dorothy Thompson | It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives. | |
| 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 | Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison ... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | I heartily accept the motto, that government is best which governs least ... Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, that government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. | |
| 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 | To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man? | |
| Thucydides | Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war. | |
| Lord Chancellor Thurlow | Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and nobody to be kicked? | |
| Preamble To The United States Constitution | We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. | |
| Alvin Toffler | The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. | |
| 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. | |
| Laurence Tribe | [The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government. | |
| Phil Trieb | [I]f we won’t choose to pay the price of liberty, then by default we shall suffer the cost of servitude -- whether it be the iron chains of a tyrannical oligarchy or the regulatory chains of unelected, faceless bureaucrats. When we witness our neighbors abused by tyrants, will we skulk away and hope we’re not next? Or will we stand by them and challenge -- as freedom-loving Americans -- the tyranny of lawless leaders. | |
| Phil Trieb | [I]f we won’t choose to pay the price of liberty, then by default we shall suffer the cost of servitude -- whether it be the iron chains of a
tyrannical oligarchy or the regulatory chains of unelected, faceless bureaucrats. When we witness our neighbors abused by tyrants, will we skulk
away and hope we’re not next? Or will we stand by them and challenge -- as freedom-loving Americans -- the tyranny of lawless leaders. | |
| Mao Tse-Tung | Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. | |
| Judge Gideon J. Tucker | No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session. | |
| Gideon J. Tucker | No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session. | |
| Henry St. George Tucker | To secure their enjoyment, however, certain protections or barriers have been erected which serve to maintain inviolate the three primary rights of personal security, personal liberty, and private property. These may in America be said to be: 1. The bill of rights and written constitutions ...\\
2. The rights of bearing arms -- which with us is not limited and restrained by an arbitrary system of game laws as in England, but is particularly enjoyed by every citizen, and is among his most valuable privileges, since it furnishes the means of resisting as a freeman ought, the inroads of usurpation.\\
3. The right of applying to the courts of justice for the redress of injuries. | |
| St. George Tucker | Civil rights, as we may remember, are reducible to three primary heads; the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property. In a state of slavery, the two last are wholly abolished, the person of the slave being at the absolute disposal of his master; and property, what he is incapable, in that state, either of acquiring, or holding, in his own use. Hence, it will appear how perfectly irreconcilable a state of slavery is to the principles of a democracy, which form the basis and foundation of our government. | |
| St. George Tucker | This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. ... The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. | |
| St. George Tucker | Whilst America hath been the land of promise to Europeans, and their descendants, it hath been the vale of death to millions of the wretched sons of Africa ... Whilst we were offering up vows at the shrine of Liberty ... whilst we swore irreconcilable hostility to her enemies ... whilst we adjured the God of Hosts to witness our resolution to live free or die ... we were imposing on our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained. | |
| Bishop Desmond Tutu | We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, '...we shouldn't have done that.' We must remember, my friends, that we have been given a wonderful cause. The cause of freedom! And you and I must be those who will walk with heads held high. We will say, 'We used methods that can stand the harsh scrutiny of history.' | |
| Mark Twain | No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the congress is in session. | |
| Mark Twain | Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. | |
| Mark Twain | In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. | |
| Mark Twain | Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. | |
| Mark Twain | It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either. | |
| Mark Twain | Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense. | |
| Mark Twain | Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. | |
| 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. | |
| United States v. Robel | It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense,
we would sanction the subversion of one of the liberties ...
which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile. | |
| Unknown | A library is an arsenal of liberty. | |
| 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. | |
| Mark Van Doren | To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in. | |
| Vermont Declaration of Rights | That frequent recurrence to fundamental principles, and a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty, and keep government free. The people ought, therefore, to pay particular attention to these points, in the choice of officers and representatives, and have a right to exact a due and constant regard to them, from their legislators and magistrates, in the making and executing such laws as are necessary for the good government of the State. | |
| Richard A. Viguerie | The first duty of government is to protect the citizen from assault. Unless it does this, all the civil rights and civil liberties in the world aren't worth a dime. | |
| Virginia Declaration of Rights | The rights enumerated in this Bill of Rights shall not be construed to limit other rights of the people not therein expressed. | |
| Voltaire | It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. | |
| Voltaire | The superfluous is very necessary. | |
| Voltaire | All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws. | |
| Voltaire | Liberty is not and cannot be anything but the power of doing what we will. | |
| Voltaire | Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too. | |
| Voltaire | It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. | |
| Voltaire | It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. | |
| Voltaire | It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. | |
| Voltaire | The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. | |
| Voltaire | ...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. | |
| Otto von Bismarck | A little caution outflanks a large cavalry. | |
| 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. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders. | |
| Ludwig Von Mises | The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | This, then, is freedom in the external life of man -- that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows. | |
| William Von Raab | There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom. | |
| Johann von Schiller | The voice of the majority is no proof of justice. | |
| Edward B. Wagner | Stop wasting jail space on prostitutes, drug users and other victimless criminals. Even if we find it morally acceptable to imprison these people for choices they make regarding their bodies, we must realize that we simply cannot afford to continue clogging the court system and the prison system with these harmless criminals. | |
| Kenneth D. Wald | Given the ambiguity of religious texts and teachings, the mixed historical record, and the empirical evidence, it would be foolhardy to assert that religious faith necessarily upholds democratic values. | |
| William Wallace | I tell you true, liberty is the best of all things;
never live beneath the noose of a servile halter. | |
| Earl Warren | Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world. | |
| Booker T. Washington | You can't hold a man down without staying down with him. | |
| George Washington | Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles. | |
| George Washington | Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth. | |
| George Washington | If we are wise, let us prepare for the worst. | |
| George Washington | There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This, within certain limits, is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party: but, in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume. | |
| George Washington | While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in Union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations... Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other. | |
| George Washington | Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence. The church, the plow, the prairie wagon, and citizen's firearms are indelibly related. From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences, and tendencies prove that to insure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and the pistol are equally indispensable. Every corner of this land knows firearms, and more than 99 99/100 percent of them by their silence indicate they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference; they deserve a place with all that's good. When firearms go, all goes; we need them every hour. | |
| George Washington | The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend on God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die. | |
| George Washington | Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action. | |
| George Washington | There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. | |
| George Washington | If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. | |
| George Washington | The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism … The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty. | |
| George Washington | Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind. | |
| George Washington | The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissensions, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.
The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils, and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another. | |
| George Washington | The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. | |
| George Washington | Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of Liberty abused to licentiousness. | |
| George Washington | Interwoven is the love of liberty with every ligament of the heart. | |
| Alan Watts | But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies. | |
| Alan Watts | Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment. | |
| John Wayne | It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something. | |
| Henry Grady Weaver | Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind. | |
| Daniel Webster | I shall defer my visit to Faneuil Hall, the cradle of American liberty, until its doors shall fly open, on golden hinges, to lovers of Union as well as of Liberty. | |
| Daniel Webster | The contest, for ages, has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power. | |
| Daniel Webster | God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it. | |
| Daniel Webster | On the light of Liberty you saw arise the light of Peace, like "another morn,"
"Risen on mid-noon;" and the sky on which you closed your eye was cloudless. | |
| Daniel Webster | Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety. | |
| Daniel Webster | If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn. | |
| Daniel Webster | Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint. | |
| Daniel Webster | Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world. | |
| Daniel Webster | The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government. | |
| Daniel Webster | Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have. | |
| Daniel Webster | Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters. | |
| Daniel Webster | Knowledge is the only fountain both of love and the principles of human liberty. | |
| 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. | |
| Noah Webster | Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. | |
| Josiah C. Wedgwood | Men must have the right of choice, even to choose wrong, if he shall ever learn to choose right. | |
| Andrew Weil, MD | In Europe, when tobacco
was first introduced,
it was immediately banned.
In Turkey, if you
got caught with tobacco,
you had your nose slit.
China and Russia imposed
the death penalty
for possession of tobacco. | |
| Simone Weil | Liberty consists in the ability to choose. | |
| Simone Weil | Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose. | |
| 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. | |
| Robert Welch | The real freedom of any individual can always be measured by the amount of responsibility which he must assume for his own welfare and security. | |
| Mae West | When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before. | |
| E. B. White | Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men. | |
| William Allen White | Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others. | |
| Walt Whitman | The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint.
The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws. | |
| George Will | The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of America is justice and securing the blessings of liberty. | |
| 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. | |
| Marianne Williamson | And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others. | |
| Wendell L. Willkie | Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love. | |
| James Wilson | Liberty and happiness have a powerful enemy on each hand; on the one hand tyranny, on the other licentiousness [anarchy]. To guard against the latter, it is necessary to give the proper powers to government; and to guard against the former, it is necessary that those powers should be properly distributed. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | I have always in my own thought summed up individual liberty, and business liberty, and every other kind of liberty, in the phrase that is common in the sporting world, 'A free field and no favor.' | |
| Woodrow Wilson | The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government power, not the increase of it. | |
| John Witherspoon | He is the best friend to American liberty, who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who set himself with the greatest firmness to bear down on profanity and immorality of every kind. Whoever is an avowed enemy of God, I scruple not to call him an enemy to his country. | |
| Wyoming Declaration of Rights Art. I, Sec. 7 | Absolute, arbitrary power over the lives, liberty and property of freemen exists nowhere in a republic, not even in the largest majority. | |
| Malcolm X | Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it. | |
| xxLiberty | | |
| Frank Zappa | Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system.
Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts.
Some of you like pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.
Forget I mentioned it... Rise for the flag salute. | |
| John Peter Zenger | No nation, ancient or modern, ever lost the liberty of speaking freely, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves. | |
| John Peter Zenger | The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the suppression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is the best preservative of the whole. | |
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