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|  Lord Acton | Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being. | |
| John Adams | The nature of the encroachment upon American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer; it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole of society. | |
| John Adams | Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty. | |
| John Adams | I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself. | |
| Samuel Adams | The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution,
are worth defending at all hazards;
and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.
We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors:
they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure
and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.
It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation,
enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us
by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them
by the artifices of false and designing men. | |
| Samuel Adams | Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. | |
| Aesop | Better to starve free than be a fat slave. | |
| Aesop | No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself. | |
| Spiro Agnew | Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression, and the leaders of various media professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me. That happens to be my amendment, too. It guarantees my free speech as it does their freedom of the press… There is room for all of us – and for our divergent views – under the First Amendment. | |
| Saul Alinsky | A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises. | |
| Corri Alius | Do whatever you can to capture, or recapture, your life spark - unless it harms others, in which case suffer with as much happiness as you can muster. Your nobility of spirit will spark itself. | |
| Lisa Alther | I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic. | |
| Marcus Aurelius Antoninus | Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them. | |
| Michael Badnarik | I have the right to do whatever I wish with my property. If I own a pile of wood, I can set fire to it even if it is currently nailed together in the shape of a barn. Cigarettes may not be healthy for me in the long run, but I have the freedom to smoke them anyway. Drinking alcohol may or may not have negative side effects, but even if it does, the government has no authority to prohibit you from consuming it, even if it is "in your own best interest." Since when do we let the government decide what is or isn't good for us? What the hell does Congress know about nutrition, anyway? (For that matter, what does Congress know about the Constitution?) If the government can use force whenever something is "in our best interest" then government should force everyone to wake up at 6am every morning for calisthenics in the front yard. Fast food establishments should be torn down and replaced with bars that serve carrot juice and alfalfa sprouts, since - "it's in your best interest." This paternalistic attitude that "the government knows best" and that you are merely a helpless child is insulting and reprehensible. Hitler used the same attitude to persuade the Germans to subjugate themselves to the "Fatherland. | |
| Ben H. Bagdikian | Letting a maximum number of views be heard regularly is not just a nice philosophical notion. It is the best way any society has yet discovered to detect maladjustments quickly, to correct injustices, and to discover new ways to meet our continuing stream of novel problems that rise in a changing environment. | |
| Mikhail A. Bakunin | Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him. | |
| Mikhail A. Bakunin | Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it. | |
| Alan Barth | Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism -- including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense; of punishing injustice? | |
| 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. | |
| Richard Bernstein | The whole point of the liberal revolution that gave rise to the 1960’s was to free us from somebody else’s dogma, but now the same people…are striving to impose on others a secularized religion…disguising it behind innocuous labels like ‘diversity training’ and ‘respect for difference.’ | |
| Daniel Joseph Berrigan | But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of truth? And more urgently,
how shall we do this in a bad time? | |
| Sir Walter Besant | Tolerance is the eager and glad acceptance of the way along which others seek the truth. | |
| Joseph L. Blau | Freedom of religion means the right of the individual to choose and to adhere to whichever religious beliefs he may prefer, to join with others in religious associations to express these beliefs, and to incur no civil disabilities because of his choice… | |
| Curtis Bok | In the whole history of law and order, the biggest step was taken by primitive man when...the tribe sat in a circle and allowed only one man to speak at a time. An accused who is shouted down has no rights whatever. | |
| William E. Borah | Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen. | |
| William Bradford | If all were to share alike, and all were to do alike, then all were on an equality throughout, and one was as good as another; and so, if it did not actually abolish those very relations which God himself has set among men, it did at least greatly diminish the mutual respect that is so important should be preserved amongst them. Let none argue that this is due to human failing, rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself.... | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | [The founding fathers] conferred, as against the Government, the right to be left alone -- the right most valued by civilized men. | |
| Kingman Brewster | Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure. | |
| Patrick J. Buchanan | The village atheist has the right to be heard; he has no right to be heeded. While he has a right not to have his own children indoctrinated in what he believes are false and foolish teachings, he has no right to dictate what other children may be taught. | |
| Buddha | Friendship is the only cure for hatred, the only guarantee of peace. | |
| Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton | Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness. | |
| Justice Warren E. Burger | There can be no assumption that today’s majority is “right” and the Amish or others like them are “wrong.” A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no right or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different. | |
| Edmund Burke | In a free country every man thinks he has a concern in all public matters,--that he has a right to form and a right to deliver an opinion on them. This it is that fills countries with men of ability in all stations. | |
| Edmund Burke | Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none. | |
| Edmund Burke | All men have equal rights, but not to equal things. | |
| Albert Camus | Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. | |
| Dr. Ben Carson | My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn’t want to be on welfare. She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare, that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that. … But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like. | |
| Jimmy Carter | The law is not the private property of lawyers, nor is justice the exclusive province of judges and juries. In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect. | |
| Jimmy Carter | We are of course a nation of differences. Those differences don’t make us weak. They’re the source of our strength. | |
| Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins. | |
| Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time. | |
| Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | The real value of freedom is not to the minority that wants to talk, but to the majority that does not want to listen. | |
| William Ellery Channing | The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot. | |
| John Jay Chapman | Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own. | |
| Lydia M. Child | Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do. | |
| Rufus Choate | Appropriated to justice, to security, to reason, to restraint; where there is no respect of persons; where will is nothing and power is nothing and numbers are nothing, and all are equal and all secure before the law. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Everybody is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage. | |
| Bill Clinton | The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this problem of...older men who prey on underage women...There are consequences to decisions and...one way or the other, people always wind up being held accountable. | |
| John Cogley | Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them. | |
| Pat Condell | Nobody should be compelled to respect an ideology that doesn’t respect them. | |
| Steven R. Covey | Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside of ourselves will affect us. | |
| Richard Cowan | One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could. | |
| Benedetto Croce | Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human... No people will be truly free till all are free. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. | |
| Steve Dasbach | Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic -- why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students. | |
| Jean de la Bruyere | A wise man neither suffers himself to be governed, nor attempts to govern others. | |
| Salvador De Madariaga | He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power. | |
| Michel De Montaigne | A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | Our First Amendment expresses a far different calculus for regulating speech than for regulating nonexpressive conduct and that is as it should be. The right to swing your fist should end at the tip of my nose, but your right to express your ideas should not necessarily end at the lobes of my ears. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | You know, being black doesn’t give you a license to call people racist any more than being Jewish gives you license to call people anti-Semitic. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | If we move away from the American tradition of lawyers defending those with whom they vehemently disagree -- as we temporarily did during the McCarthy period -- we weaken our commitment to the rule of law... So beware of an approach which limits advocacy to that which is approved by the standards of political correctness. | |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself. | |
| 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. | |
| Frederick Douglass | What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? ... Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God -- less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. It assumes that nature has erred; that the law of liberty is a mistake; that freedom, though a natural want of the human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom; that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. What shall be done with them? Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone. | |
| John J. Dunphy | How wonderful the world might be if only we gave to each other all the
love we claim to give to God, a thought which has been expressed time and
time again, yet it still manages to resound with a poignance that is almost
painful. Such a world can be ours, sisters and brothers. Let us work
together to achieve it. | |
| Friedrich Durrenmatt | The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all. | |
| Albert Einstein | Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. | |
| Albert Einstein | A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion
of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting
us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to
us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our
circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the
striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a
foundation for inner security. | |
| Albert Einstein | Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual. | |
| Albert Einstein | The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | I developed a practice which, so far as I know, I have never violated. The practice is to avoid public mention of any name unless it can be done with favorable intent and connotation; reserve all criticism for the private conference; speak only good in public. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore." | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going. | |
| Epictetus | The beginning of philosophy is the recognition of the conflict between opinions. | |
| Edward Everett | Freedom may come quickly in robes of peace, or after ages of conflict and war; but come it will, and abide it will, so long as the principles by which it was acquired are held sacred. | |
| 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. | |
| Abe Fortas | Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent. And they must give it the respect and the latitude which they claim for themselves. | |
| Viktor Frankl | Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | It is very imprudent to deprive America of any of her privileges. If her commerce and friendship are of any importance to you, they are to be had on no other terms than leaving her in the full enjoyment of her rights. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Public; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence [printers] cheerfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute. | |
| Margaret Fuller | I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue. | |
| Rick Gaber | If I said, "The live-and-let-live people I've met are generally warm and generous, although often reserved and respectful, while the control freaks I've met are generally cynical, mean and aggressively obnoxious," would that seem likely to be true? Of course it does. It IS true, and it's obviously logically consistent and what you'd expect. BUT, if I said, "I've found the intellectual defenders of private property and laissez-faire capitalism whom I've met to be generally warm and generous, while the so-called "liberal" defenders of the welfare state I've found to be often cynical, mean and tight-fisted in their personal lives," would THAT seem likely to be true? Think about it. Well, it's also true ... it's a matter of semantics, or word choice. BECAUSE BOTH SENTENCES SAY EXACTLY THE SAME THING. | |
| Albert Gallatin | The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Live life simply so that others may simply live. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Courtesy towards opponents and eagerness to understand their view-point is the ABC of non-violence. | |
| William Lloyd Garrison | No man shall rule over me with my consent. I will rule over no man. | |
| Katherine Fullerton Gerould | All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing. | |
| Nikki Giovanni | In the name of peace They waged the wars Ain't they got no shame | |
| Jo Godwin | A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The moment men obtain perfect freedom, that moment they erect a stage for the manifestation of their faults. The strong characters begin to go wrong by excess of energy; the weak by remissness of action. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The unnatural, that too is natural. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being. | |
| Horace Greeley | I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot. | |
| Alan Greenspan | Regulation -- which is based on force and fear -- undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory. | |
| Erwin N. Griswold | The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | If it be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws. | |
| Judge Learned Hand | The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women... | |
| Elizabeth Harrison | Those who are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better. | |
| 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 | Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel
with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism
which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. ...
What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own
spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and
that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be
confused. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | ...if we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion. | |
| William Hazlitt | The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. | |
| Lillian Hellman | Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice? | |
| Ernest Hemingway | Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function. | |
| Nat Hentoff | Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices – taking advantage of our freedom of speech – who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do. | |
| Hillel | What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Law: all the rest is interpretation. | |
| Eric Hoffer | One realizes that one of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does. | |
| Eric Hoffer | To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins. | |
| Horace | “Painters and poets,” you say, “have always had an equal license in bold invention.” We know; we claim the liberty for ourselves and in turn we give it to others. | |
| Elbert Hubbard | There is no freedom on earth or in any star for those who deny freedom to others. | |
| Justice Charles Evans Hughes | Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope. It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.' | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. | |
| Jan Hunt | All children behave as well as they are treated. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | The priceless heritage of our society is the
unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think
as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism,
and we have no claim to it. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to
one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly
the functions in which he is competent ...\\
- To let the National Government be entrusted with the defense of the
nation, and its foreign and federal relations ...\\
- The State Governments with the Civil Rights, Laws, Police and
administration of what concerns the State generally.\\
- The Counties with the local concerns, and each ward direct the interests
within itself.\\
It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great
national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the
administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone
what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | ...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery. | |
| Lyndon B. Johnson | Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | They make a rout about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | The true measure of a man
is how he treats someone
who can do him absolutely no good. | |
| Chief Joseph | I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian... we can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself. | |
| Franz Kafka | I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. | |
| Immanuel Kant | Everyone may seek his own happiness in the way that
seems good to himself, provided that he infringe not such freedom
of others to strive after a similar end as is consistent with
the freedom of all according to a possible general law. | |
| Sir Arthur Keith | As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs. | |
| George F. Kennan | The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. | |
| Mark Kennedy | As part of the conversation with student leaders, we talked about the concept of Zero Tolerance. While I appreciate the desire for such a policy, it is unachievable under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The challenge we all face is to find the balance between wanting to eliminate expressions of racism and bigotry and supporting the free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. If we value freedom of speech, we must acknowledge that some may find the expressions of others unwelcome, painful, or even, offensive. We can, however, speak out and condemn such expressions, and we can work to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment. | |
| Omar Khayyam | Indeed the Idols I have loved so long,\\
have done my credit in this World much wrong;\\
have drowned my Glory in a shallow Cup,\\
and sold my Reputation for a Song. | |
| Matt Kibbe | The Rules for Liberty\\\\
1) Don’t hurt people: Free people just want to be left alone, not hassled or harmed by someone else with an agenda or designs over their life and property.\\
2) Don’t take people’s stuff: America’s founders fought to ensure property rights and our individual right to the fruits of our labors.\\
3) Take responsibility: Liberty takes responsibility. Don’t sit around waiting for someone else to solve your problems.\\
4) Work for it: For every action there is an equal reaction. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded.\\
5) Mind your own business: Free people live and let live.\\
6) Fight the power: Thanks to the Internet and the decentralization of knowledge, there are more opportunities than ever to take a stand against corrupt authority. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust ... is in reality expressing the highest respect for law ... We will not obey your evil laws. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | A man who won't die for something is not fit to live. | |
| Rudyard Kipling | All we have of freedom--all we use or know--
This our fathers bought for us, long and long ago. | |
| Russell Kirk | The aim of any good constitution is to achieve in a society a high degree of political harmony, so that order and justice and freedom may be maintained. | |
| Jeanne Knutson | In their tendencies toward tolerance, openmindedness, faith in people and lack of authoritarianism, selfactualizers do appear to possess psychic strengths which allow them to work well in situations marked by a diversity of viewpoints. | |
| Charles Koch | A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens. The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism. | |
| Charles Koch | Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government. That’s why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles. | |
| Prince Peter Kropotkin | Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown. | |
| Richard Lamm | Let me offer you, metaphorically, two magic wands that have sweeping powers to change society. With one wand you could wipe out all racism and discrimination from the hearts and minds of white America. The other wand you could wave across the ghettos and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning and ambition. ... I suggest that the best wand for society and for those who live in the ghettos and barrios would be the second wand. | |
| C. S. Lewis | It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. | |
| Sinclair Lewis | Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize. | |
| Joshua Liebman | Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong. | |
| 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 | If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time. | |
| Walter Lippmann | When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions. | |
| Walter Lippmann | While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes that right important. | |
| Walter Lippmann | While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes the right important. | |
| John Locke | The body of People may with Respect resist intolerable Tyranny. | |
| Henry Cabot Lodge | Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin. | |
| John Lubbock | If we are ever in doubt about what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. | |
| Archibald MacLeish | Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man. | |
| James Madison | Whilst we assert a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to choose minds who have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. | |
| James Madison | As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: So there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us, faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another. | |
| James Madison | What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support? | |
| James Madison | What can be more reasonable than that when crowds of them [immigrants] come here, they should be forced to renounce everything contrary to the spirit of the Constitution[?] | |
| Peyton Conway March | There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else. | |
| Everett Dean Martin | Tolerance is a better guarantee of freedom than brotherly love; for a man may love his brother so much that he feels himself thereby appointed his brother’s keeper. | |
| Giuseppe Mazzini | Liberty, understood by materialists as the right to do or not to do anything not directly injurious to others, we understand as the faculty of choosing, among the various modes of fulfilling duty, those most in harmony with our own tendencies. | |
| Mencius | The great man does not think beforehand of his words that they may be sincere, nor of his actions that they may be resolute -- he simply speaks and does what is right. | |
| H. L. Mencken | We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. | |
| John Stuart Mill | If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. | |
| John Milton | When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for. | |
| Thomas S. Monson | Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect. | |
| 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. | |
| W. A. Nance | No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him. | |
| Huey P. Newton | I have the people behind me and the people are my strength. | |
| Reinhold Niebuhr | Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth. | |
| Eleanor Holmes Norton | The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with. | |
| Rev. Edmund A. Opitz | There is a place for government in the affairs of men, and our Declaration of Independence tells us precisely what that place is. The role of government is to protect individuals in their God-given individual rights. Freedom is the natural birthright of man, but all that government can do in behalf of freedom is to let the individual alone, and it should secure him in his rights by making others let him alone. | |
| Ovid | Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these. | |
| Thomas Paine | I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. | |
| 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. | |
| Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus | Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature. | |
| Jean Paul | Individuality is to be preserved and respected everywhere, as the root of everything good. | |
| Pericles | Instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. | |
| 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. | |
| General Colin Powell | Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return. | |
| General Colin Powell | So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear.
And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home ... to live our own lives in peace. | |
| Proverb | Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. | |
| Ronald Reagan | The NRA believes America's laws were made to be obeyed and that
our Constitutional liberties are just as important today as 200 years ago.
And by the way, the Constitution does not say
Government shall decree the right to keep and bear arms.
The Constitution says 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms
shall not be infringed.' | |
| Ronald Reagan | For too long, the world was paralyzed by the argument that terrorism could not be stopped until the grievances of terrorists were addressed. The complicated and heartrending issues that perplex mankind are no excuse for violent, inhumane attacks, nor do they excuse not taking aggressive action against those who deliberately slaughter innocent people. | |
| John D. Rockefeller, Jr. | I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living. | |
| Will Rogers | It will take America fifteen years of steady taking care of our own business and letting everybody else's alone, to get us back to where everybody speaks to us again. | |
| Clinton Lawrence Rossiter III | The Americans of 1776 were among the first men in modern society to defend rather than to seek an open society and constitutional liberty.... Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of this political theory sits in its deep-seated conservatism. However radical the principles of the Revolution may have seemed to the rest of the world, in the minds of the colonists they were thoroughly preservative and respectful of the past. | |
| Dr. Benjamin Rush | Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The earth becomes more crowded, and our dependence upon our neighbours becomes more intimate. In these circumstances life cannot remain tolerable unless we learn to let each other alone in all matters that are not of immediate and obvious concern to the community. We must learn to respect each other's privacy, and not to impose our moral standards upon each other. The Puritan imagines that his moral standard is the moral standard; he does not realize that other ages and other countries, and even other groups in his own country, have moral standards different from his, to which they have as good a right as he has to his. Unfortunately, the love of power which is the natural outcome of Puritan self-denial makes the Puritan more executive than other people, and makes it difficult for others to resist him. Let us hope that a broader education and a wider knowledge of mankind may gradually weaken the ardour of our too virtuous masters. | |
| Willy Russell | I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun. | |
| Dr. Mary J. Ruwart | Using aggression to stop drug abuse kills more people than the drugs themselves! If we honored our neighbor’s choice, the people now enforcing the minimum wage and licensing laws would be available to go after the real criminals. In 1987, drug offenders made up 36% of the federal prison population. As the War on Drugs escalates, more of our law enforcement dollar will be spent on drug-related crimes and less on rapists, murderers, and thieves. Is this the best way to deal with the drug problem? ... People who drink an alcoholic beverage in the privacy of their own homes are not using first-strike force, theft, or fraud against anyone else. Nor is a person smoking a joint or snorting cocaine, under the same conditions, guilty of anything more sinister than trying to feel good. We see no contradiction in arresting the cocaine user while we enjoy our favorite cocktail. Are we once again sanctioning aggression-through-government in an attempt to control the lives of others? In the early 1900s, many people supported aggression through-government to stop the consumption of alcoholic beverages. As we all know, Prohibition was tried, but it just didn’t work. People still drank, but they had to settle for home-brews, which were not always safe. Some people even died from drinking them. Since business people could no longer sell alcohol, organized crime did. Turf battles killed innocent bystanders, and law enforcement officials found they could make more money taking bribes than jailing the bootleggers. Aggression was ineffective—and expensive, both in terms of dollars and lives. When Prohibition was repealed, people bought their alcohol from professional brewers instead of criminals. As a result, they stopped dying from bathtub gin. The turf fighting subsided, since there was no turf to fight about. The murder and assault rate that had skyrocketed during Prohibition fell steadily after its repeal. | |
| Andrei Sakharov | Profound insights arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas. | |
| Debra Saunders | If politicians don't respect the law, why should citizens respect politicians? | |
| John Godfrey Saxe | Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made. | |
| Eric Schaub | Standing up to a tyrant
has always been illegal and dangerous.
There is no guarantee but one --
to not live like a slave,
nor to die like one. | |
| Eric Schaub | Among the mighty are those who recognize beauty as power, and power as beautiful. | |
| Carl Schurz | If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other. | |
| Carl Schurz | From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | But how much more highly do I think of these men! They can do these things, but decline to do them. To whom that ever tried have these tasks proved false? To what man did they not seem easier in the doing? Our lack of confidence is not the result of difficulty. The difficulty comes from our lack of confidence. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. | |
| Edward A. Shils | A free society can exist only when public spirit is balanced by an equal inclination of men to mind their own business. | |
| Mark Skousen | In a free society, individuals have the right to do right or wrong, as long as they don’t threaten or infringe upon the rights or property of others. | |
| Adam Smith | How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. | |
| L. Neil Smith | Few things are more laughably pitiable than authority once it has been successfully defied. | |
| Socrates | Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions,
but those who kindly reprove thy faults. | |
| Herbert Spencer | There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is a proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance – that principle is condemnation before investigation. | |
| Baruch Spinoza | Only free men are thoroughly grateful one to another. | |
| Lysander Spooner | Vices are not crimes. | |
| Lysander Spooner | Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime—that is, the design to injure the person or property of another—is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property. | |
| J. A. Stormer | The pretence is made that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness, and social chaos. The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respected people have escaped from moral chains and are able to think freely. | |
| Joseph Story | Men, to act with vigour and effect, must have time to mature measures, and judgment and experience, as to the best method of applying them. They must not be hurried on to their conclusions by the passions, or the fears of the multitude. They must deliberate, as well as resolve. | |
| Justice Joseph Story | If aliens might be admitted indiscriminately to enjoy all the rights of citizens at the will of a single state, the Union might itself be endangered by an influx of foreigners, hostile to its institutions, ignorant of its powers, and incapable of a due estimate of its privileges. | |
| William Graham Sumner | | |
| William Graham Sumner | If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation,
I must understand that I can have no other man under my control. | |
| William Graham Sumner | If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control. | |
| Publilius Syrus | Keep the golden mean between saying too much and too little. | |
| Tecumseh | Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.\\
Trouble no one about his religion.\\
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.\\
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.\\
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.\\
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.\\
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.\\
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.\\
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. \\
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.\\
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.\\
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.\\
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home. | |
| John Templeton | No human has yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities ... I grew up Presbyterian. Presbyterians thought the Methodists were wrong. Catholics thought all Protestants were wrong. The Jews thought the Christians were wrong. So, what I'm financing is humility. I want people to realize that you shouldn't think you know it all. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Must a citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a
conscience, then? It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. | |
| Bishop Desmond Tutu | We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, '...we shouldn't have done that.' We must remember, my friends, that we have been given a wonderful cause. The cause of freedom! And you and I must be those who will walk with heads held high. We will say, 'We used methods that can stand the harsh scrutiny of history.' | |
| Mark Twain | A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. | |
| Unknown | Be more aware of your responsibilities than of your rights. | |
| Paul Valéry | The world acquires value only through its extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. | |
| Mark Van Doren | Respect for the truth is an acquired taste. | |
| Voltaire | I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | This, then, is freedom in the external life of man -- that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows. | |
| Izaak Walton | I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, 'That which is everybody's business is nobody's business'. | |
| Earl Warren | The only protection of every citizen from such deprivation of rights is a strict adherence to the Bill of Rights by everyone for everyone. This should be self-evident but the danger of erosion of rights stems largely from the fact that so many citizens of the majority, who have never been deprived of any of these rights, find it difficult to understand what the deprivation of them means in the lives of others. | |
| George Washington | It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn. | |
| George Washington | My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: Being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so. | |
| George Washington | [T]he policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people. | |
| J. C. Watts, Jr. | Too often when we talk about racial healing, we make the old assumption that government can heal the racial divide. … Republicans and Democrats – red, yellow, black and white – have to understand that we must individually, all of us, accept our share of responsibility. … It does not happen by dividing us into racial groups. It does not happen by trying to turn rich against poor or by using the politics of fear. It does not happen by reducing our values to the lowest common denominator. And friends, it does not happen by asking Americans to accept what’s immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance. | |
| J. C. Watts, Jr. | We must be a people who dare, dare to take responsibility for our hatred and fears and ask God to heal us from within. And we must be a people of prayer, a people who pray as if the strength of our nation depended on it, because it does. | |
| Amy Wax | Remind students that one of the central missions of the university, which justifies its existence, is to get at the truth. That requires honest debate, patience, intellectual honesty, investigation, and a lot of hard work. But it also is not for the faint of heart. And that is a lesson that is almost never transmitted today. That offense, bruising thoughts, and unpleasant facts simply go with the territory. They are an intrinsic feature of an open society, and they never can be entirely avoided. | |
| John Walter Wayland | The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe. | |
| Robert Welch | I want for our country enough laws to restrain me from injuring others, so that these laws will also restrain others from injuring me. I want enough government, with enough constitutional safeguards, so that this necessary minimum of laws will be applied equitably to everybody, and will be binding on the rulers as well as those ruled. Beyond that I want neither laws nor government to be imposed on our people as a means or with the excuse of protecting us from catching cold, or of seeing that we raise the right kind of crops, or of forcing us to live in the right kind of houses or neighborhoods, or of compelling us to save money or to spend it, or of telling us when or whether we can pray. I do not want government or laws designed for any other form of welfarism or paternalism, based on the premise that government knows best and can run our lives better than we can run them ourselves. And my concept of freedom, and of its overwhelming importance, is implicit in these aspirations and ideals. | |
| William Allen White | Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others. | |
| Rev. George Whitefield | There but for the grace of God go I. | |
| John Wilson | The benefits of the reading, writing and math does [sic] not outweigh the need for [black and white] children to learn to work and play together. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom -- is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man. | |
| A. L. Wirin | The rights of all persons are wrapped in the same constitutional bundle as those of the most hated member of the community. | |
| Glenn Woiceshyn | One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights. | |
| John Wooden | Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights. | |
| Virginia Woolf | If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. | |
| William Wordsworth | Man free, man working for himself, with choice of time, place, and object. | |
| Rod Wright | Ladies and Gentlemen, we only pass laws against people who obey the law. Drug dealers, bank robbers and rapists don’t care what we do because they willfully violate the law anyway. | |
| Walter Wriston | Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated. Capital is not just money. It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they are well treated. | |
| Malcolm X | Power never takes a back step -- only in the face of more power. | |
| Dr. Ravi Zacharias | It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one's private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation's moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? .... The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil. | |
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