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| 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 | 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 | Society's demands for moral authority and character increase
as the importance of the position increases. | |
| John Adams | Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty. | |
| John Adams | We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other. | |
| 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 Quincy Adams | The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected, in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity. | |
| 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. | |
| Aesop | Vices are their own punishment. | |
| 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continuously under attack… These actions apparently arise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. | |
| Aristotle | For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends. | |
| Aristotle | It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man, or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done. | |
| Aristotle | A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. | |
| Thurman Arnold | The spectacle of a judge pouring over the picture of some nude, trying to ascertain the extent to which she arouses prurient interests, and then attempting to write an opinion which explains the difference between that nude and some other nude has elements of low comedy. | |
| Saint Augustine | Give me chastity and self-restraint, but do not give it yet. | |
| 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. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | Cocaine habit forming? Of course not. I ought to know, I've been using it for years. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | I'm a foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right. | |
| Alderman Rodney Barket | What I'd like to see police do is deal with important issues and not these sorts of victimless crimes when society is riddled with problems. | |
| 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 | When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| John Biggs Jr. | Let us revise our views and work from the premise that all laws should be for the welfare of society as a whole and not directed at the punishment of sins. | |
| William Blake | A truth that's told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of people would die for Him. | |
| Robert Bork | [A] society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable. | |
| Elias Boudinot | Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow. | |
| Robert Briffault | Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government. | |
| Heywood Hale Broun | The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice so pleasurable that I assume it must be evil. | |
| Lenny Bruce | Anyone who does anything for pleasure to indulge his selfish soul will surely burn in Hell. | |
| 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. | |
| Buddha | Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good. | |
| Bulletin of the FBI | Marihuana is a more dangerous drug than heroin or cocaine. I am surprised to learn that certain police officers have been inclined to minimize the effects of the use of marihuana. They would, I am sure, be convinced that the drug is adhering to its Old World traditions of murder, assault, rape, physical demoralization, and mental breakdown. A study of the effects of marihuana shows clearly that it is a dangerous drug, and Bureau records prove that its use is associated with insanity and crime. | |
| Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton | If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues. | |
| Edmund Burke | Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist. | |
| Edmund Burke | There never was a bad man that had ability for good service. | |
| Samuel Butler | There should be some schools
called deformatories
to which people are sent
if they are too good
to be practical. | |
| C. Arthur Campbell | When we regard a man as morally responsible for an act, we regard him as a legitimate object of moral praise or blame in respect of it. But it seems plain that a man cannot be a legitimate object of moral praise or blame for an act unless in willing the act he is in some important sense a ‘free’ agent. Evidently free will in some sense, therefore, is a precondition of moral responsibility. | |
| Al Capone | When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Edwin Hubbel Chapin | No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things. | |
| Lydia M. Child | Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do. | |
| Chinese Proverb | Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one. | |
| Dr. G. Brock Chisolm | What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality - the concept of right and wrong. The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all of psychotherapy. | |
| Noam Chomsky | Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite. | |
| William Kingdon Clifford | It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. | |
| Bill Clinton | The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this problem of...older men who prey on underage women...There are consequences to decisions and...one way or the other, people always wind up being held accountable. | |
| Bill Clinton | We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... | |
| Charles Caleb Colton | He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism. | |
| Confucius | If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything. | |
| Joseph Conrad | You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. | |
| Patrick Cox | The holier-than-thou activists who blame the population for not spending more money on their personal crusades are worse than aggravating. They encourage the repudiation of personal responsibility by spreading the lie that support of a government program fulfills individual moral duty. | |
| 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. | |
| John De Armond | You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal. | |
| Vittorio de Sica | Moral indignation is in most cases 2% moral, 48% indignation and 50% envy. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | I know of no other country where love of money
has such a grip on men's hearts or
where stronger scorn is expressed for
the theory of permanent equality of property. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | ... liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. | |
| Daniel Defoe | I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent. | |
| John G. Diefenbaker | Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. | |
| Frederick Douglass | The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous. | |
| Albert Einstein | Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | That which we call sin in others is experiment for us. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. | |
| William Faulkner | Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. | |
| Geoffrey Fisher | In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes. | |
| Larry Flynt | If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me. | |
| Jay Fox | Every attempt to gag the free expression of thought is an unsocial act against society. That is why judges and juries who try to enforce such laws make themselves ridiculous. | |
| 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 | As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes; and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. | |
| James Anthony Froude | To deny freedom of the will is to make morality impossible. | |
| Margaret Fuller | I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Once one assumes an attitude of intolerance, there is no knowing where it will take one. Intolerance, someone has said, is violence to the intellect and hatred is violence to the heart. | |
| William Lloyd Garrison | Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion? | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Jo Godwin | A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. | |
| Hermann Goering | I joined the party because I was a revolutionary, not because of any ideological nonsense. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being. | |
| Barry Goldwater | Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue. | |
| 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? | |
| Erwin N. Griswold | The privilege against self-incrimination is one of the great landmarks in man's struggle to make himself civilized... The Fifth is a lone sure rock in time of storm ... a symbol of the ultimate moral sense of the community, upholding the best in us. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step. | |
| 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 | The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule. | |
| William Hazlitt | The only vice
that can not be forgiven
is hypocrisy. | |
| Chris Hedges | We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is to never let them find out. | |
| 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. | |
| Granville Hicks | The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself. | |
| George Jacob Holyoake | There can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth. | |
| Herbert Hoover | Honest difference of views and honest debate are not disunity.
They are the vital process of policy among free men. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people. | |
| Aldous Huxley | The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced. | |
| Thomas Henry Huxley | What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We shall have our follies without doubt. Some one or more of them will always be afloat. But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry, not of Jesuitism. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. | |
| 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 | Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | [F]alsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Money and not morality is the principle of commerce and commercial nations. | |
| 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. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. | |
| Ernest Jones | [Censors are] people with secret attractions to various temptations... They are defending themselves under the pretext of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weaknesses. | |
| Immanuel Kant | The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away. | |
| 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. | |
| John F. Kennedy | A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers -- and this is the basis of all human morality. | |
| Alan Keyes | The act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember that our whole way of life is predicated on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well. | |
| Alan Keyes | ...[A] prohibition on moral judgments against various sexual behaviors is a violation of the freedom, even of the religious liberty, of those who view such behavior as wrong. If we don't have a right to act according to our religious belief by forming judgments according to those beliefs about human conduct and behavior, then, exactly what does the free exercise of religion mean? Can the free exercise of religion really mean simply that I have the right to believe that God has ordained certain things to be right or wrong but that I can't act accordingly? Surely free exercise means the freedom to act according to belief. And, yet, if we are not allowed to act according to belief when it comes to fundamental moral precepts, then what will be the moral implications of religion? None at all. But if we accept an understanding of religious liberty that doesn't permit us to discriminate the wheat from the chaff in our own actions and those of others, haven't we in fact permitted the government to dictate to us a uniform approach to religion? And, isn't that dictation of uniformity in religion exactly what the First Amendment intended to forbid? | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust. | |
| 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. | |
| Paul Kirk | I hate this "crime doesn't pay" stuff. Crime in the U.S. is perhaps one of the biggest businesses in the world today. | |
| Henry Kissinger | We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing. | |
| Paul Kurtz | Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom. | |
| Charles Lamb | I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is. | |
| Jerome Lawrence | I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy. You can only punish. I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches — its upholders as well as its defiers. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. | |
| G. Gordon Liddy | A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man,
which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | It is the eternal struggle between these two principles - right and wrong - throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time... | |
| John Locke | Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | Last, but by no means least, courage -- moral courage, the courage of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle -- the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked. | |
| 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 | The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. | |
| Robert M. MacIver | The legal code can never be identified with the code of morals. It is no more the function of government to impose a moral code than to impose a religious code. And for the same reason. | |
| 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 | In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. | |
| James Madison | There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. | |
| Morris Mandel | Always put off until tomorrow what you shouldn't do at all. | |
| 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. | |
| Groucho Marx | Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. | |
| Donald S. McAlvaney | In every declining civilization there is a small "remnant" of people who adhere to the right against the wrong; who recognize the difference between good and evil and who will take an active stand for the former and against the latter; who can still think and discern and who will courageously take a stand against the political, social, moral, and spiritual rot or decay of their day. | |
| Barry McCaffrey | The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration. | |
| Gail W. McGee | I’m going to introduce a resolution to have the postmaster general stop reading dirty books and deliver the mail. | |
| Terence McKenna | If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. | |
| Margaret Mead | The contempt for law and the contempt for the human consequences of lawbreaking go from the bottom to the top of American society. | |
| Menander | Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice: the destructive power resides within. Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes, the worm eats away the wood; but greatest of all evils is envy, impious habitant of corrupt souls, which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking. | |
| Thomas Merton | May God prevent us from becoming 'right-thinking men' -- that is to say, men who agree perfectly with their own police. | |
| 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. | |
| Henry Miller | Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. | |
| 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 | 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. | |
| Richard Mitchell | We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love. | |
| Molière | Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue. | |
| Lance Morrow | The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance -- a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms -- A Nation of Finger Pointers. | |
| 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. | |
| David A. Nichols | As a first-time drug law offender, I was sentenced to 27 non-parolable years in prison. The amount of time was based on liquid waste found in the garage and unprocessed chemicals. There were no drugs. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose. | |
| Richard M. Nixon | Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. | |
| Northwest Ordinance, Article III, 1787 | Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert, and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | There is only one basic human right,
the right to do as you damn well please.
And with it comes the only basic human duty,
the duty to take the consequences. | |
| James R. Otteson | If it would be wrong for the government to adopt an official religion, then, for the same reasons, it would be wrong for the government to adopt official education policies. The moral case for freedom of religion stands or falls with that for freedom of education. A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do. | |
| Ouida | Petty laws breed great crimes. | |
| Ovid | Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor. (I see the better way, and approve it; I follow the worse.) | |
| 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 | Character is much easier kept than recovered. | |
| Thomas Paine | When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. | |
| Isabel Paterson | Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. | |
| 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. | |
| William Penn | To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals. | |
| William Penn | Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants. | |
| Philo of Alexandria | Money, it has been said, is the cause of good things to a good man, of evil things to a bad man. | |
| Plato | Excess generally causes reaction, and produces a change in the opposite direction, whether it be in the seasons, or in individuals, or in governments. | |
| Plato | Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. | |
| John Rawls | The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one, analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | To educate a man in mind, and not in morals, is to educate a menace to society. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. | |
| I. Nelson Rose | Lottery tickets are the only consumer products actively promoted and sold by the state. The state does not sell toothpaste, or even promote brushing your teeth. But it tells people they should gamble. The main marketing concern is how to attract new players, who otherwise wouldn't gamble. | |
| 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. | |
| Murray N. Rothbard | It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty. | |
| Dr. Benjamin Rush | The only foundation for... a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments. | |
| Willy Russell | I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun. | |
| Lord Herbert Louis Samuel | Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built. | |
| George Santayana | Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. | |
| Edwin M. Schur | The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims. | |
| 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 | Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit he was a first-rate political economist. | |
| 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. | |
| Jerome H. Skolnick | Whether or not legislation is truly moral is often a question of who has the power to define morality. | |
| Samuel Smiles | Liberty is quite as much a moral as a political growth,--the result of free individual action, energy, and independence. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State. | |
| George Soros | Although I have made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat. | |
| Thomas Sowell | Neither your life nor my life, nor the future of this country, will be affected in the slightest by whether Linda Tripp is naughty or nice. But if any president is able to commit crimes with impunity by using the vast powers and perquisites of his office to cover up, then we will have a danger of corruption and abuse of power that can only grow with the passing years and generations. | |
| 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 | The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. | |
| Lysander Spooner | Vices are not crimes. | |
| Josef Stalin | America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold:
its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life.
If we can undermine these three areas,
America will collapse from within. | |
| J. A. Stormer | The pretence is made that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness, and social chaos. The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respected people have escaped from moral chains and are able to think freely. | |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe | I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred -- that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt. | |
| 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. | |
| Mark Twain | Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest. | |
| Mark Twain | Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty -- the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself. | |
| 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. | |
| Sun Tzu | Those who excel in war first cultivate their own humanity and justice and maintain their laws and institutions. By these means they make their governments invincible. | |
| 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. | |
| Voltaire | It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. | |
| Voltaire | It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Earl Warren | Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness to our society. | |
| George Washington | Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder. | |
| George Washington | Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. | |
| George Washington | Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest prop of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge in the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle... Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? | |
| 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 | No government is respectable which is not just. Without unspotted purity of public faith, without sacred public principle, fidelity, and honor, no machinery of laws, can give dignity to political society. | |
| Daniel Webster | Our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be trusted on any other foundation than religious principle, not any government secure which is not supported by moral habits.... Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens. | |
| Noah Webster | The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scripture ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. All the miseries and evil men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible. | |
| H. G. Wells | Moral indignation: jealousy with a halo. | |
| Mae West | When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before. | |
| Oscar Wilde | He hasn't one redeeming vice. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom -- is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man. | |
| 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. | |
| John Wooden | Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights. | |
| Dr. Ravi Zacharias | It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one's private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation's moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? .... The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil. | |
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