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|  Lord Acton | It is bad to be oppressed by a minority,
but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. | |
| John Adams | Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it. | |
| 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 | 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. | |
| Felix Adler | Dogma is the convictions of one man imposed authoritatively upon others. | |
| Jonathan H. Adler | Through the rapid proliferation of laws reaching every corner of human existence, “the government is manufacturing more criminals now than ever before.” The list of illegal activities includes more minutiae than one would think possible. Beer-makers are barred from listing alcohol content on bottles, and liquor distilleries cannot advertise on TV. Filling one’s own prairie pothole can land a property owner in jail, as can protecting private property from unlawful intruders. Placing handbills in neighbors’ mailboxes is strictly prohibited, and attempting to sell nectarines of an improper size is a federal offense. Companies are no longer allowed to give salaried professionals partial days off without pay, and in Texas it is a crime to call oneself an interior designer without the government’s permission. It is perhaps easier to recount all that remains legal than all that is now prohibited. | |
| Eli Adorno | Do you think someone who is about to rape you is going to stop and think about a condom? | |
| Aeschylus | Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might. | |
| 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. | |
| Woody Allen | We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice. | |
| American Bar Association | It is the duty of the officials to prevent or suppress the threatened disorder with a firm hand instead of timidly yielding to threats…. Surely a speaker ought not to be suppressed because his opponents propose to use violence. It is they who should suffer from their lawlessness, not he. | |
| 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. | |
| Aristophanes | The wise learn many things from their enemies. | |
| Aristotle | To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these
retain their facility when they are too large. | |
| Margot Asquith | What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it. | |
| 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. | |
| Walter Bagehot | Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt. | |
| Mikhail Bakunin | The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation -- which speculates upon the labor of people - will always find the means for its existence. | |
| Hosea Ballou | The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important. | |
| Jerome Barkow | I have great sympathy for the oppressed but I do not expect them to be morally superior to the oppressors. I merely expect them to be oppressed. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its purpose is to protect persons and property.... If you exceed this proper limit -- if you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, or artistic -- you will then be lost in uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it on you. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you – the social reformers – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them. | |
| Georges Bernanos | Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. | |
| Andrew Bernstein | Statism – the subordination of the individual to the state -- leads inevitably to the most hideous oppression. | |
| Albert J. Beveridge | Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. | |
| 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 | The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. | |
| Steve Biko | The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. | |
| 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. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress. | |
| 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. | |
| Boston Evening Post | [It is] a natural Right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the [English] Bill of rights, to keep arms for their own defense; and as Mr. Blackstone observes, it is to be made use of when the sanctions of Society and law are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression. | |
| 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. | |
| Anne Bradstreet | Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. | |
| Anne Bradstreet | Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. | |
| Robert Briffault | Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government. | |
| James A. C. Brown | Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority. | |
| Harry Browne | The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it. | |
| Sir Thomas Browne | The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority. | |
| Tammy Bruce | No matter how noble the original intentions, the seductions of power can turn any movement from one seeking equal rights to one that would deny them to others. | |
| Buddha | Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good. | |
| Edmund Burke | People crushed by law have no hope but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous... | |
| Edmund Burke | The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another. | |
| Sir Richard Francis Burton | The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own. | |
| Richard Evelyn Byrd, Sr. | A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man's counting house.... The law will of necessity have inquisical features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it, men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, and detectives will descend upon the state. | |
| 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. | |
| Albert Camus | The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants. | |
| Albert Camus | Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. | |
| Albert Camus | The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Catherine of Siena | Every evil, harm and suffering in this life comes from the love of riches. | |
| Mona Charen | [T]he sprawl of government into every conceivable realm of life has caused the withering of traditional institutions. Fathers become unnecessary if the government provides Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Church charities lose their mission when the government provides food, shelter and income to the poor. And the non-poor no longer feel pressed to provide aid to those in need, be they aged parents or their unfortunate neighbors—“compassion” having become the province of the state. | |
| Nien Cheng | [A]fter unleashing the Red Guards … to serve his political purposes, Mao Zedong was no longer able to control them. | |
| Nien Cheng | Day and night the city resounded with the loud noise of drums and gongs … looting and the ransacking of private homes … The violence of the Red Guards seemed to have escalated. … Articles in the newspapers … encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism. They were … exhorted to be fearless in their work of toppling the old world and building a new one based on Mao’s teachings. | |
| Nien Cheng | The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the ‘Four Olds’: old culture, old customs, old habits, and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of ‘old’; it was left to the Red Guards to decide. First of all, they changed street names. | |
| Dr. G. Brock Chisolm | To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas. | |
| Joseph H. Choate | The Act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended here upon principles as communistic, socialistic - what shall I call them - populistic as ever have been
addressed to any political assembly in the world. | |
| 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 | The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | From the days of Spartacus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxenburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. | |
| 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. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others. | |
| Civil Servants' Year Book | When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed... | |
| Frank Clark | There is nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitor. | |
| Henry Clay | An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters. | |
| William Kingdon Clifford | There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey. | |
| Bill Clinton | The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people. | |
| Bill Clinton | We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... | |
| Bill Clinton | We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... | |
| Morris R. Cohen | Small groups or communities may be far more oppressive to the individual than larger ones. Men are in many ways freer in large cities than in small villages. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Men in authority will always think that
criticism of their policies is dangerous.
They will always equate their policies with
patriotism, and find criticism subversive. | |
| New Hampshire Constitution | The doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind. | |
| Steven Crowder | This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you...
Hate speech is inextricably tied to political correctness, or Cultural Marxism, and that creates intellectual conformity -- or intellectual authoritarianism. And that’s where you start to see things like “safe spaces” or “trigger warnings” or speakers banned from campus, or people with unpopular opinions banned from social media. | |
| Steven Crowder | This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you... | |
| Justice David Davis | The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people,
equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection
all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.
No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences,
was ever invented by the wit of man than
that any of its provisions can be suspended
during any of the great exigencies of government.
Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism,
but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false;
for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it,
which are necessary to preserve its existence;
as has been happily proved by the result
of the great effort to throw off its just authority. | |
| 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. | |
| Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis | Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings
for making everything compulsory
that isn't forbidden. | |
| Bertrand de Jouvenel | A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. | |
| Jean de la Bruyere | A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob; an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Love of justice in the generality of men is only the fear of suffering from injustice. | |
| Michel De Montaigne | Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | [Some people] have a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government amongst a people in which the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and I think that, if such a government were once established amongst such a people, it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them of several of the highest qualities of humanity. Despotism, therefore, appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic times. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | ...above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare them for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood... | |
| 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. | |
| Demosthenes | Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master. | |
| 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. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery. | |
| 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 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 | The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and…the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression and obedience. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. | |
| Frederick Douglass | Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. | |
| Frederick Douglass | I have no sympathy for the narrow, selfish notion of economy which assumes that every crumb of bread which goes into the mouth of one class is so much taken from the mouths of another class. | |
| Frederick Douglass | The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. | |
| 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 | The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. | |
| Robert P. Doyle | When books are challenged, restricted, removed, or banned, an atmosphere of suppression exists…. The fear of the consequences of censorship is as damaging as, or perhaps more damaging than, the actual censorship attempt. After all, when a published work is banned, it can usually be found elsewhere. Unexpressed ideas, unpublished works, unpurchased books are lost forever. | |
| John Dryden | War is the trade of Kings. | |
| John J. Dunphy | The history of Christianity has been largely written in blood, the
blood of those whom it has sought to proselytize as well as that of those
Christians who did not share the theology or ambitions of the male clerical
oligarchy that has always wielded power in Christendom. This ignoble
distinction is not nor has it ever been the exclusive prerogative of any
particular denomination or sect; it is a living legacy of horror that is
tragically common to the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox
bodies of Christian churches. | |
| John J. Dunphy | If the previous paragraphs [of 'A Religion For A New Age'] prove
anything, it is that the Bible is not merely another book, an outmoded and
archaic book, or even an extremely influential book; it has been and remains
an incredibly dangerous book. It and the various Christian churches which
are parasitic upon it have been directly responsible for most of the wars,
persecutions and outrages which humankind has perpetrated upon itself over
the past two thousand years. | |
| Clint Eastwood | At Waco, was there really an urgency to get those people out of the compound at that particular time? Was the press going to make it look heroic for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms? At Ruby Ridge, there was one guy in a cabin at the top of the mountain. Was it necessary for federal agents to go up there and shoot a 14-year-old in the back and shoot a woman with a child in her arms? What kind of mentality does that? | |
| Thomas A. Edison | People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project (Muscle Shoals Dam) nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest. | |
| Albert Einstein | Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. | |
| Albert Einstein | The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment. | |
| W. Vaughn Ellsworth | Pity the poor, wretched, timid soul, too faint hearted to resist his oppressors.
He sings the songs of the damned, 'I cannot resist, I have too much to lose,
they might take my property or confiscate my earnings,
what would my family do, how would they survive?'
He hides behind pretended family responsibility, failing to see that
the most glorious legacy that we can bequeath to our posterity is liberty! | |
| Rahm Emmanuel | You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. | |
| Quintus Ennius | To open his lips is crime in a plain citizen. | |
| Hans Eysenck | If you admit that to silence your opponent by force is to win an intellectual argument, then you admit the right to silence people by force. | |
| Feminists Against Censorship | Censorship is a dangerous tool that is primarily used to suppress from those who would challenge oppression by the society and that state, and particularly victimizes minorities. [It] can never eliminate evil ideas, and so the best answer to bad speech is more speech. | |
| 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. | |
| Justice Stephen J. Field | Here I close my opinion. I could not say less in view of
questions of such gravity that go down to the very foundations of the government. If the
provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an Act of Congress, where is the course
of usurpation to end? The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but
the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will
become a war of the poor against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness. | |
| Shelia Fitzpatrick | The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as, from 1933 onward, “political criminality” was given a much broader definition than ever before and most forms of dissent and criticism were gradually criminalized. The result was that more “laws” or lawlike measures were put on the books than ever. | |
| 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. | |
| Janet Frame | “For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction. | |
| Justice Felix Frankfurter | The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes | |
| Viktor Frankl | We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: 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 | ... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ... | |
| Benjamin Franklin | History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy… These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. ... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed... | |
| Benjamin Franklin | It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. | |
| 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 | The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good
purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interest. | |
| Milton Friedman | Inflation is taxation without representation. | |
| 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. | |
| Justice Melville Fuller | The power of the state to impose restraints and burdens upon persons and property in conservation and promotion of the public health, good order, and prosperity is a power originally and always belonging to the states, not surrendered to them by the general government, nor directly restrained by the constitution of the United States, and essentially exclusive. | |
| Dr. Thomas Fuller | The more laws the more offenders. | |
| Dr. Thomas Fuller | The more laws the more offenders. | |
| 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 | Non-violent resistance implies the very opposite of weakness. Defiance combined with non-retaliatory acceptance of repression from one's opponents is active, not passive. It requires strength, and there is nothing automatic or intuitive about the resoluteness required for using non-violent methods in political struggle and the quest for Truth. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest. | |
| Daryl Gates | We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason. | |
| William Glasser | There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison. | |
| William Godwin | To dragoon man into the adoption of what we think right, is an intolerable tyranny. | |
| William Godwin | Let us consider the effect that coercion produces upon the mind of him against whom it is employed. It cannot begin with convincing; it is no argument. It begins with producing the sensation of pain, and the sentiment of distaste. It begins with violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. It includes in it a tacit confession of imbecility. If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is important, but he really punishes me because his argument is weak. | |
| Joseph Paul Goebbels | National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel. | |
| Joseph Paul Goebbels | The money pigs of capitalist democracy… Money has made slaves of us… Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. | |
| Robert Justin Goldstein | Political repression consists of government action which grossly discriminates against persons or organizations viewed as presenting a fundamental challenge to existing power relationships or key governmental policies, because of their perceived political beliefs. | |
| Colin Gray | American strategic [nuclear] forces do not exist solely for the purpose of deterring a Soviet nuclear threat or attack against the U.S. itself. Instead, they are intended to support U.S. foreign policy. | |
| Germaine Greer | Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life. | |
| Angelica Grimke | The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians. | |
| A. Whitney Griswold | Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. | |
| Suheir Hammad | Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician.
Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there.
Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16.
A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death.
A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you.
Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.
And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine. | |
| 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. | |
| Heinrich Heine | Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. | |
| 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. | |
| Ammon Hennacy | Force is the weapon of the weak. | |
| Patrick Henry | Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death! | |
| Auberon Herbert | ... every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive. | |
| Auberon Herbert | If we cannot learn, if the only effect upon us of the presence of the dynamiter in our midst is to make us multiply punishments, invent restrictions, increase the number of our official spies, forbid public meetings, interfere with the press, put up gratings -- as in one country they propose to do -- in our House of Commons, scrutinize visitors under official microscopes, request them, as at Vienna, and I think now at Paris also, to be good enough to leave their greatcoats in the vestibules ... I venture to prophesy that there lies before us a bitter and an evil time. | |
| Frank Herbert | The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. | |
| Adolf Hitler | Without law and order our nation cannot survive. | |
| Adolf Hitler | Society's needs come before the individual's needs. | |
| Adolf Hitler | Gold is not neccesary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state, without an ounce of gold behind it. Anyone who sells above the set prices, let him be marched off to a concentration camp. That's the bastion of money. | |
| Adolf Hitler | It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole. | |
| 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! | |
| Adolf Hitler | The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy. | |
| Friedrich Hoelderlin | What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven. | |
| Eric Hoffer | I doubt if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate. | |
| Eric Hoffer | A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will. | |
| Eric Hoffer | To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility. | |
| Eric Hoffer | The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do. | |
| Eric Hoffer | It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate. | |
| Thomas Holcroft | To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils. | |
| 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. | |
| Herbert Hoover | It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice. | |
| Hans Hermann Hoppe | The state spends much time and effort persuading the public that it is not really what it is and that the consequences of its actions are positive rather than negative. | |
| Horace | Force without wisdom falls of its own weight. | |
| Jacob G. Hornberger | Another major reason why crime is increasing is that crime pays, and in our tax-ridden, regulation crushed economy, many people cannot economically survive through low-end jobs. ... 'The income that offenders can earn in the world of crime, as compared with the world of work, all too often makes crime appear to be the better choice.' In Washington, D.C., it costs $7,000 in city fees to open a pushcart. In California, up to eighty federal and state licenses are required to open a small business. In New York, a medallion to operate a taxicab costs $150,000. More than 700 occupations in the United States require a government license. Throughout the country, church soup kitchens are being closed by departments of health. No wonder so many people turn to crime and violence to survive. | |
| Kenkó Hoshi | So long as people, being ill governed, suffer from hunger, criminals will never disappear. It is extremely unkind to punish those who, being suffers from hunger, are compelled to violate laws. | |
| Isaiah | Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the bundles that oppress, let those who are broken go free, and break asunder every burden. Share your bread with the hungry, welcome into your house the afflicted and homeless; when you see a naked man, clothe him, and do not turn your back on your own flesh. Then your light will arise like the dawn, and your wound will quickly be healed. Your justice shall go before you, the glory of the Lord will closely follow you | |
| Andrew Jackson | It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. | |
| Andrew Jackson | The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice. | |
| 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. | |
| 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | That this privilege of giving or of withholding our monies is an important
barrier against the undue exertion of prerogative, which
if left altogether without control may be exercised to our great oppression;
and all history shews how efficacious is its intercession
for redress of grievances and re-establishment of rights,
and how improvident would be the surrender of so powerful a mediator. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The two principles on which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice and fear. After the injuries we have done them, they cannot love us ... | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | He [King George III] has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. | |
| 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 | I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. It places the governors indeed more at their ease at the expense of the people. The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given much more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen States in the course of eleven years is but one for each State in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of the government prevent insurrections. In England, where the hand of power is heavier than with us, there are seldom half a dozen years without an insurrection. In France, where it is still heavier but less despotic, as Montesquieu supposes, than in some other countries and where there are always two or three hundred thousand men ready to crush insurrections, there have been three in the course of the three years I have been here, in every one of which greater numbers were engaged than in Massachusetts. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth. | |
| Howard Mumford Jones | Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it. | |
| Carl Gustav Jung | Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units. | |
| 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. | |
| Garrison Keillor | My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time. | |
| Walt Kelly | We have met the enemy and he is us. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | In our struggle against racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, I came to see at a very early stage that a synthesis of Gandhi's method of nonviolence and the Christian ethic of love is the best weapon available to Negroes for this struggle for freedom and human dignity. It may well be that the Gandhian approach will bring about a solution to the race problem in America. His spirit is a continual reminder to oppressed people that it is possible to resist evil and yet not resort to violence. | |
| 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. | The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | I firmly believe that the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States. | |
| 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.' | |
| Judge Whitman Knapp | [A]fter 20 years on the bench, I have concluded that Federal drug laws are a disaster. It is time to get the Government out of drug enforcement. ... If the possession or distribution of drugs were no longer a Federal crime, other levels of government would face the choice of enforcement or ... decriminalizing. ... The variety, complexity and importance of these questions make it exceedingly clear that the Federal Government has no business being involved in any of them. What might be a hopeful solution in New York, could be a disaster in Idaho, and only State legislatures and city governments, not Congress, can pass laws tailored to local needs. ... It [Congress] should repeal all Federal laws that prohibit or regulate their distribution ... | |
| Dr. Kurt E. Koch | Each person will have a registered number, without which he will not be allowed to buy or sell; and there will be one universal world church. Anyone who refuses to take part in this universal system will have no right to exist. | |
| Arthur Koestler | Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware. | |
| 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. | |
| David C. Korten | Thus corporations finally claimed the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens while being exempted from many of the responsibilities and liabilities of citizenship. Furthermore, in being guaranteed the same right to free speech as individual citizens, they achieved, in the words of Paul Hawken, 'precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent: domination of public thought and discourse.' The subsequent claim by corporations that they have the same right as any individual to influence the government in their own interest pits the individual citizen against the vast financial and communications resources of the corporation and mocks the constitutional intent that all citizens have an equal voice in the political debates surrounding important issues. | |
| Lao-Tzu | The more laws and restrictions there are, the poorer people become. | |
| 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. | |
| 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 | The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation. | |
| Murray B. Levin | No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the façade of democratic institutions. | |
| 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 | Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims 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 consciences. | |
| 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. | |
| C. S. Lewis | For who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed? | |
| C. S. Lewis | Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not even regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call 'disease' can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.
This expresses my idea of democracy. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves. | |
| 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. | |
| Walter Lippmann | The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd. | |
| 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 | If the innocent honest Man must quietly quit all he has for Peace sake, to him who will lay violent hands upon it, I desire it may be considered what kind of Peace there will be in the World, which consists only in Violence and Rapine; and which is to be maintained only for the benefit of Robbers and Oppressors. | |
| 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. | |
| Stony Loft | If you look like a rabbit, and act like a rabbit, you will be treated like a rabbit -- prey for all predators. | |
| 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 | Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of opinion. | |
| 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 | Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor. | |
| Lucanus | The liberty of the people, he says, whom power restrains unduly, perishes through liberty.
[Lat., Libertas, inquit, populi quem regna coercent,
Libertate perit.] | |
| Lord George Lyttleton | To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction. | |
| 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. | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society. | |
| James Madison | Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. | |
| James Madison | If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. | |
| James Madison | The internal effects of a mutable policy are [...] calamitous. It poisons the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow. | |
| James Madison | Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it. | |
| James Madison | During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of Christianity has been upon trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution. | |
| James Madison | In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature. | |
| 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 | A people armed and free forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition and is a bulwark for the nation against foreign invasion and domestic oppression. | |
| James Madison | It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed? | |
| James Madison | From this view of the subject, it may be concluded, that a pure Democracy, by which I mean a society, consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will in almost every case, be felt by the majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is, that such 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 deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed, that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions. | |
| James Madison | A just security to property is not afforded by that government, under which unequal taxes oppress one species of property and reward another species. | |
| James Madison | Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents. | |
| Maurice Maeterlinck | Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past. | |
| Nelson Mandela | A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire. | |
| Thomas Mann | It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available. | |
| Justice John Marshall | An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy;
because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation. | |
| Jose Marti y Perez | Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom. | |
| 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. | |
| Luther Martin | By the power to lay and collect imposts Congress may impose duties on any or every article of commerce imported into these states to what amount they please. By the power to lay excises, a power very odious in its nature, since it authorizes officers to examine into your private concerns, the Congress may impose duties on every article of use or consumption: On the food that we eat, on the liquors we drink, on the clothes that we wear, the glass which enlighten our houses, or the hearths necessary for our warmth and comfort. By the power to lay and collect taxes, they may proceed to direct taxation on every individual either by a capitation tax on their heads or an assessment on their property. By this part of the section, therefore, the government has a power to tax to what amount they choose and thus to sluice the people at every vein as long as they have a drop of blood left. | |
| Karl Marx | Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. | |
| George Mason | To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them. | |
| George Mason | Considering the natural lust for power so inherent in man, I fear the thirst of power will prevail to oppress the people. | |
| George Mason | [W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia. | |
| William R. Mattox, Jr. | In 1950, the average family of four paid 2% of its earnings to federal taxes. Today it pays 24%. | |
| 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. | |
| Bob McEwen | Now the last time the Democrats controlled the House, the Senate and the Presidency for four years, was under Jimmy Carter, and so what happened? Exactly the same. That is, we’re all going to run out of this or that or the other thing. We’re all going to run out, we had gas lines, we’re all going to freeze to death. He had his little sweater on and said you had to wear your sweater to ride your bicycle and turn your thermostat down because America’s coming to an end next Tuesday, a week, and there isn’t anything anybody can do about it. Those folks don’t know how to run anything. So therefore, and the night before the election in which Ronald Reagan went on television and said, “There’s nothing wrong with America that the proper leadership won’t cure.” Now the first thing that they did was to take all of those crazy regulations from the oil industry and throw them in the Potomac, and in 24 hours, in 24 hours gas stations that had been closed night after night, for year after year, when I drove back and forth from Ohio to Washington, I knew I had to have a full tank of gas by 4:00 in the afternoon because there wasn’t a single filling station between Washington and Ohio that was open. When we, when my wife and I drove home in March 1981, she was asleep on the seat and we drove up into Hillsborough, Ohio, and there the lights were on at the filling station where they’d been closed for nearly 3 years, and I woke her up, I said, “See sweetheart? Had we not won the election, this never would have happened.” | |
| John F. McManus | Left has come to represent increasing government control. The extreme leftist typically seeks total government. Working their way toward total government power are the Communists, socialists, fascists, and modern liberals who advocate government solutions for every real or imagined problem. | |
| Melians | It may be your intent to be our masters; how can it be ours to be your slaves? | |
| Mencius | To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads -- such is the behavior of the multitude. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when the fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think. | |
| 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 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 | Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself. | |
| H. L. Mencken | All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man. | |
| Dr. Joseph Mengele | The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it. | |
| John Stuart Mill | If any opinion be compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. | |
| John Stuart Mill | There is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical opinions... The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy. | |
| 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 | Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men. | |
| Arthur Miller | The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom. The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims. | |
| 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. | |
| Charles W. Moore | If the political-correctness fascists get their way, we can safely assume it will be correct-thinking, “political cleansing” squads deciding what we can or cannot say on the Intenet. These people fear public debate and demand homogenization of “acceptable” attitudes compatible with their emotional, utopian idealism. | |
| 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 Viscount Morley | You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. | |
| Lance Morrow | Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past,
by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business.
Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control...
to be locked into a sequence of act and response,
of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always.
The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past.
Forgiveness frees the forgiver.
It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare. | |
| 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. | |
| Edward R. Murrow | If none of us ever read a book that was “dangerous,” had a friend who was “different,” or joined an organization that advocated “change,” we would all be the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants. | |
| Benito Mussolini | Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State. | |
| Benito Mussolini | Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power. | |
| Lyle Myhr | When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet. | |
| Huey P. Newton | Before 1776 America was a British colony. The British Government had certain laws and rules that the colonized Americans rejected as not being in their best interests. In spite of the British conviction that Americans had no right to establish their own laws to promote the general welfare of the people living here in America, the colonized immigrant felt he had no choice but to raise the gun to defend his welfare. Simultaneously he made certain laws to ensure his protection from external and internal aggressions, from other governments, and his own agencies. One such form of protection was the Declaration of Independence, which states: '... whenever any government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.' Now these same colonized White people, these bondsmen, paupers, and thieves deny the colonized Black man not only the right to abolish this oppressive system, but to even speak of abolishing it. | |
| Huey P. Newton | You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution. | |
| Huey P. Newton | We felt that the police needed a label, a label other than that fear image that they carried in the community. So we used the pig as the rather low-lifed animal in order to identify the police. And it worked. | |
| Huey P. Newton | There will be no prison which can hold our movement down...
The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards
can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people. | |
| 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 | Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. | |
| 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. | |
| José Ortega y Gasset | This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State;
that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run
sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies. | |
| George Orwell | Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. | |
| George Orwell | The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about. | |
| George Orwell | The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders. | |
| George Orwell | Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. | |
| George Orwell | Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull. | |
| George Orwell | The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. | |
| P. D. Ouspensky | The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm. | |
| Thomas Paine | When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. | |
| Thomas Paine | For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever. | |
| Thomas Paine | An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. | |
| 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. | |
| Michael Parenti | The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful
ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate
themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric
of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny. | |
| Kort E. Patterson | According to Gestapo records…they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them. | |
| Laurence J. Peter | Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status. | |
| Shirley Peterson | Eight decades of amendments... to (the) code have produced a virtually impenetrable maze... The rules are unintelligible to most citizens... The rules are equally mysterious to many government employees who are charged with administering and enforcing the law. | |
| Edward J. Phelps | If oppression and wrong should gain the ascendancy, and injustice stalk abroad in the land, and all else fail him; nevertheless his humblest roof, and all things that are sheltered beneath it, would find, somehow, someway, a final refuge and protection in the Supreme Court of the United States. | |
| William Pitt | The poorest man may in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement. | |
| William Pitt, Sr. | Unlimited Power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it. | |
| Plato | Do not expect justice where might is right. | |
| Plato | When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. | |
| Sir Karl Popper | There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions… It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory. | |
| Josiah Quincy, Jr. | Blandishments will not fascinate us, nor will threats of a "halter" intimidate. For, under God, we are determined that wheresoever, whensoever, or howsoever we shall be called to make our exit, we will die free men. | |
| Ayn Rand | Do you think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power the 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. | |
| Ayn Rand | The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind. | |
| Ayn Rand | A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule. | |
| Ayn Rand | We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. | |
| Ayn Rand | The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is
precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities. | |
| Ronald Reagan | Man is not free unless government is limited.... As government expands, liberty contracts. | |
| Ronald Reagan | There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity. | |
| 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. | |
| Ralph Reiland | For the average family, all these taxes now eat 38 percent of gross income, a higher rate of taxation than ever before in the peacetime history of the United States. By comparison, the typical two-income family in the mid-1950s paid 28 percent of their income for taxes. We’re now at the absurd point where the typical family works until noon of every working day to satisfy the taxman, paying more in taxes than they spend for food, clothing and housing combined. | |
| Ralph Reiland | It ain’t over on April 15! If you stop, for example, for a $10 pizza on Thursday night to celebrate being done with the IRS for another year, the taxman will be right there to grab a slice or two. On top of paying the sales tax, you’ll also be picking up a major chunk of what the government charges the pizza shop owner for local property taxes, unemployment insurance taxes, federal payroll taxes, federal and state and local income taxes, and worker’s compensation taxes. Altogether, according to a study by the Americans for Tax Reform, that comes to $3.80 on a $10 pizza for the omnipresent taxman. If you pick up a Bud six-pack to go with the pizza, there’s another 43 cents of each beer dollar that goes straight to the taxman for excise taxes, income taxes, property taxes, etc. For something stronger, say Jack Daniels, the taxman’s share is $7.20, on average, out of every $10. Go lighter and just drink Pepsi and it’s 35 percent of what you pay that goes for taxes at all levels. Add some Marlboros and its 75 percent of the retail price that’s funneled directly into the state’s coffers. Get home and hit the light switch and another $26 out of every $100 on the electric bill goes for government rather than electricity. If you’re flying the next day, the taxman is up early and waiting at the aiport, pocketing $40 on every $100 airline ticket. And he’s there in the hotel lobby when you land, snatching $43 on every $100 of the hotel bill. Go out to dinner and it’s another $28 of every $100 of the tab that ends up with the government rather than with the restaurant, the farmers, truckers and everyone else who worked together to produce the meal. | |
| Paul Craig Roberts | According to the Tax Foundation, the average American worker works 127 days of the year just to pay his taxes. That means
that government owns 36 percent of the average American’s output—which is more than feudal serfs owed the robber barons. That 36 percent is more than the average American spends on food, clothing and housing. In other words, if it were not for taxes, the average American’s living standard would at least double. | |
| Madame Jeanne-Marie Roland | O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name! | |
| Edward Alsworth Ross | During the last dozen years the tales of suppression of free assemblage, free press, and free speech, by local authorities or the State operating under martial law have been so numerous as to have become an old story. They are attacked at the instigation of an economically and socially powerful class, itself enjoying to the full the advantages of free communications, but bent on denying them to the class it holds within its power... | |
| Murray N. Rothbard | It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright. | |
| Murray N. Rothbard | Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the state is profoundly and inherently anti-capitalist. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. | |
| Mike Ruff | Ruff's Third Law of Economic Dynamics: "An economy in motion tends to stay in motion, and an economy at rest tends to stay at rest. A free market is constantly in motion. A centrally planned market slows until it eventually dies completely. | |
| 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. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The laws in question can, therefore, only be justified by the theory of vindictive punishment, which holds that certain sins, though they may not injure anyone except the sinner, are so heinous as to make it our duty to inflict pain upon the delinquent. This point of view, under the influence of Benthamism, lost its hold during the nineteenth century. But in recent years, with the general decay of Liberalism, it has regained lost ground, and has begun to threaten a new tyranny as oppressive as any in the Middle Ages. | |
| Bertrand Russell | Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power. Consequently those who live under the dominion of Puritanism become exceedingly desirous of power. Now love of power does far more harm than love of drink or any of the other vices against which Puritans protest. Of course, in virtuous people love of power camouflages itself as love of doing good, but this makes very little difference to its social effects. It merely means that we punish our victims for being wicked, instead of for being our enemies. In either case, tyranny and war result. Moral indignation is one of the most harmful forces in the modern world, the more so as it can always be diverted to sinister uses by those who control propaganda. | |
| Florence Sabin | The prohibition law,
written for weaklings and derelicts,
has divided the nation,
like Gaul, into three parts --
wets, drys, and hypocrites. | |
| A. E. Samaan | Fascism, communism and national socialism all share in common the explicit premise that the individual must subordinate himself to society's needs, or as Hitler would phrase it: 'Society's needs come before the individual needs.' | |
| 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. | |
| Friedrich Schiller | No, there is a limit to the tyrant's power! \\
When the oppressed man finds no justice, \\
When the burden grows unbearable, he appeals \\
With fearless heart to Heaven, \\
And thence brings down his everlasting rights, \\
Which there abide, inalienably his, \\
And indestructible as stars themselves. \\
The primal state of nature reappears, \\
Wherein man confronts his fellow man; \\
And if all other means shall fail his need, \\
One last resort remains—his own good sword. \\
The dearest of our goods we may defend From violence. \\
We stand before our country, \\
We stand before our wives, before our children!\\ | |
| Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. | Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics. | |
| 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. | |
| Albert Schweitzer | I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end. | |
| Senate Report, 93rd Congress | Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency....Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communication; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens. ...
A majority of the people of the United States have lived all of their lives under emergency rule. For 40 years, freedoms and governmental procedures guaranteed by the Constitution have, in varying degrees, been abridged by laws brought into force by states of national emergency....from, at least, the Civil War in important ways shaped the present phenomenon of a permanent state of national emergency. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Laws do not persuade
just because they threaten. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Once again prosperous and successful crime goes by the name of virtue; good men obey the bad, might is right and fear oppresses law. | |
| Butler D. Shaffer | The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill, and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices, expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge. | |
| Butler D. Shaffer | Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor" not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us. | |
| Simmons v. U.S. | We find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another. | |
| Adam Smith | The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it. | |
| L. Neil Smith | Each day, it seemed, another law was passed to impoverish and diminish them, punishing them for whatever success they achieved and rewarding their less competent and industrious neighbors. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Solon | If through your vices you afflicted are,
Lay not the blame of your distress on God;
You made your rulers mighty, gave them guards,
So now you groan 'neath slavery's heavy rod. | |
| Solon | We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by it as those who have been. | |
| Herbert Spencer | All socialism involves slavery.... That which fundamentally distinguishes the slave is that he labors under coercion to satisfy another's desires. The relation admits of many gradations. Oppressive taxation is a form of slavery of the individual to the community as a whole. The essential question is -- How much is he compelled to labor for other benefit than his own, and how much can he labor for his own benefit? | |
| Charles T. Sprading | A political convention illustrates the workings of majority rule: If the minority in a party advocate a progressive move which is defeated when put to a vote in the convention, the minority are prohibited from advancing it during the campaign; if this minority refuse to advocate what the convention has decided to be right, they are barred from the platform and press, the cry of majority rule is raised against them, and they are called "traitors to the party;" but if they abandon their progressive ideas and advocate the wishes of the majority they are rewarded with office. Thus majority rule develops the dishonest politician: in order to rule sometime, he consents to being ruled at other times. The desire to rule and the willingness to be ruled ends in degradation; and no one who accepts the principles of equal liberty can endorse majority rule. | |
| Charles T. Sprading | The history of civilized man is the history of the incessant conflict between liberty and authority. Each victory for liberty marked a new step in the world's progress; so we can measure the advance of civilization by the amount of freedom acquired by human institutions. | |
| Josef Stalin | If the opposition (citizen) disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Stendhal | The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. | |
| Allie Beth Stuckey | When you elevate victimhood as virtue, you will create a culture in which people are tripping over themselves to be oppressed. | |
| William Graham Sumner | Everywhere you go on the continent of Europe at this hour you see the conflict between militarism and industrialism. You see the expansion of industrial power pushed forward by the energy, hope, and thrift of men, and you see the development arrested, diverted, crippled, and defeated by measures which are dictated by military considerations. | |
| William Graham Sumner | All history is one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others. | |
| Cornelius Tacitus | The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. | |
| Cornelius Tacitus | Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws. | |
| A. J. P. Taylor | Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history. | |
| Tennessee Constitution | That government being instituted for the common benefit, the doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind. | |
| 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. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. | |
| 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 | Why does it [government] always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels? | |
| 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. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | Governments need armies to protect them against their enslaved and oppressed subjects. | |
| 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. | |
| Leon Trotsky | Religions are illogical primitive ignorance. There is nothing as ridiculous and tragic as a religious government. | |
| Harriet Tubman | I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves. | |
| 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.' | |
| Bishop Desmond Tutu | If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. | |
| Mark Twain | The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise. | |
| 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. | |
| Stewart L. Udall | We have, I fear, confused power with greatness. | |
| Unknown | Do not mistake for conspiracy and intrigue what can best be explained by stupidity and incompetence. | |
| Unknown | The worst penalties are always imposed on those seeking to help the oppressed. | |
| U.S. Department of Defense Planning Guide for 1994-1999 | We [the U.S.] must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order . . . we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. | |
| U.S. Department of State | The United States must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a pax-Americana. | |
| Royce Van Norman | Is it not ironical that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'? | |
| Richard K. Vedder | Productive, private citizens in outlying regions of our nation and states are financially burdened to pay for a parasite public economy of lawmakers, lobbyists, contractors, and bureaucrats in the political centers. | |
| Voltaire | It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | The struggle for freedom ... is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities -- sometimes of a minority of but one man -- against the majority. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | This, then, is freedom in the external life of man -- that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows. | |
| Ludwig Von Mises | It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine’s correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconscious convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines. | |
| 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. | |
| Chad Walsh | From the utopian viewpoint, the United States constitution is a singularly hard-bitten and cautious document, for it breathes the spirit of skepticism about human altruism and incorporates a complex system of checks, balances and restrictions, so that everybody is holding the reins on everybody else. | |
| Booker T. Washington | You can't hold a man down without staying down with him. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| 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-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means. | |
| Vin Weber | We create the government that screws you, and then you’re supposed to thank us for protecting you from it. | |
| 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 | 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. | |
| Noah Webster | Another source of power in government is a military force. But this, to be efficient, must be superior to any force that exists among the people, or which they can command; for otherwise this force would be annihilated, on the first exercise of acts of oppression. 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. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive. | |
| 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. | |
| Noah Webster | Why not include a provision that everybody shall, in good weather, hunt on his own land and catch fish in rivers that are public property and that Congress shall never restrain any inhabitant of America from eating and drinking, at seasonable times, or prevent his lying on his left side, in a long winter's night, or even on his back, when he is fatigued by lying on his right. | |
| Oscar Wilde | Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. | |
| Oscar Wilde | All authority is quite degrading. | |
| Walter E. Williams | Conservatives and liberals are kindred spirits as far as government spending is concerned. ... Since government has no resources
of its own, and since there’s no Tooth Fairy handing Congress the funds for the programs it enacts, we are forced to recognize that government
spending is no less than the confiscation of one person’s property to give it to another to whom it does not belong -- in effect, legalized theft. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.
A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.
Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation,
therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.
We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely
controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world.
No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by
conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by
the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world--no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men. | |
| Mary Wollstonecraft | I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves. | |
| Virginia Woolf | The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. | |
| Frances Wright | Persecution for opinion is the master vice of society. | |
| Yahooligans Reference | Police State: A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force. | |
| Frank Zappa | Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass. | |
| Frank Zappa | Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over. | |
| Eve Zibart | Prejudice rarely survives experience. | |
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