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|  John Adams | The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing. | |
| John Adams | The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. | |
| John Adams | When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more. | |
| John Adams | Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have... a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers. | |
| John Quincy Adams | Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom. | |
| Samuel Adams | 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 | Among the natural Rights of the Colonists are these: First, a Right to Life; secondly, to Liberty; thirdly, to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best Manner they can. Those are evident Branches of, rather than Deductions from, the Duty of Self-Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature. | |
| Eli Adorno | Do you think someone who is about to rape you is going to stop and think about a condom? | |
| J. Tucker Alford | It is precisely this clinging to victimhood as a means of demonstrating one’s virtue and advancing one’s well-being that has led us into a society in which welfare and quotas are “civil rights,” government handouts are “entitlements,” and payment to girls having babies out of wedlock are “compassionate,” while hard-working, ambitious people are “greedy,” punishment of crime is “oppression,” and an independent thinker who stands for courage and self-reliance is dismissed as an “Uncle Tom.” | |
| Woody Allen | I call the mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master [and] receives new truth as an angel from Heaven. | |
| Amnesty International | The USA was founded in the name of democracy, equality and individual freedom, but is failing to deliver the fundamental promise of protecting rights for all. | |
| Susan B. Anthony | It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it. | |
| Alderman Rodney Barket | What I'd like to see police do is deal with important issues and not these sorts of victimless crimes when society is riddled with problems. | |
| Alan Barth | Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve... But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic. | |
| Dan Baum | The [Supreme] Court during the past decade let police obtain search warrants on the strength of anonymous tips. It did away with the need for warrants when police want to search luggage, trash cans, car interiors, bus passengers, fenced private property and barns. | |
| Dan Baum | The Supreme Court is steadily eroding the protections against police excess promised by the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. | |
| Henry Campbell Black | Liberty, whether natural, civil, or political, is the lawful power in the individual to exercise his corresponding rights. It is greatly favored in law. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment. | |
| Lawana Blackwell | Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery. | |
| 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… | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. | |
| Justice William J. Brennan | The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism. | |
| Orville Browning | Be assured that if this new provision [the 14th Amendment] be engrafted in the Constitution, it will, in time, change the entire structure and texture of our government, and sweep away all the guarantees of safety devised and provided by our patriotic Sires of the Revolution. | |
| William F. Buckley, Jr. | We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down. | |
| Edmund Burke | We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation. | |
| William S. Burroughs | After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell
wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military. | |
| George Herbert Walker Bush | Freedom and the power to choose should not be the privilege of wealth. They are the birthright of every American. | |
| Al Capone | When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality. | |
| Jimmy Carter | America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America. | |
| 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. | |
| Shirley Chisholm | It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts. | |
| Noam Chomsky | If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | The price of greatness is responsibility. | |
| Ramsey Clark | A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you. | |
| 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... | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism. | |
| Constitution for the USA | We the People of the united States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. | |
| John Dickinson | Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness... We claim them from a higher source -- from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The First Amendment makes confidence in the common sense of our people and in the maturity of their judgment the great postulate of our democracy. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life. | |
| Frederick Douglass | Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. | |
| John Foster Dulles | Of all the tasks of government, the most basic is to protect its citizens from violence. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith. | |
| Thomas I. Emerson | The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being. | |
| Milton Friedman | I think that prohibition of drugs is the most immoral program that the United States has ever engaged in. It's destroyed civil rights at home and it is responsible for thousands of deaths abroad. | |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | Under the privilege of the First Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said. | |
| 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 | Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it.
But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | 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. | |
| Jean Genet | Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun. | |
| David Lloyd George | Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite; who made ten thousand people owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth? | |
| William Godwin | Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion. | |
| Hermann Goering | Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Tolerance comes of age. I see no fault committed that I myself could not have committed at some time or other. | |
| Horace Greeley | I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot. | |
| Edison Haines | With every civil right there has to be a corresponding civil obligation. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. | |
| Jean Harris | [The prison guards are] capable of committing daily atrocities and obscenities, smiling the smile of the angels all the while. | |
| John Hay | The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. | |
| 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. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost. | |
| 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! | |
| Eric Hoffer | Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity. | |
| Billie Holiday | You can be up to your boobies in white satin,
with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles,
but you can still be working on a plantation. | |
| Billie Holiday | I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own. | |
| Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. | |
| Herbert Hoover | Honest difference of views and honest debate are not disunity.
They are the vital process of policy among free men. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how
popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite
safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary
government, and one more safeguard against tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | If [anyone] can find in Title VII ... any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | None of us would trade freedom of expression for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it. | |
| Julian Huxley | I believe the State exists for the development of individual lives,
not individuals for the development of the state. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so. | |
| William James | The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We shall have our follies without doubt. Some one or more of them will always be afloat. But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry, not of Jesuitism. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. | |
| 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 | I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are only injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands]. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It had become an universal and almost uncontroverted position in the several States, that the purposes of society do not require a surrender of all our rights to our ordinary governors; that there are certain portions of right not necessary to enable them to carry on an effective government, and which experience has nevertheless proved they will be constantly encroaching on, if submitted to them; that there are also certain fences which experience has proved peculiarly efficacious against wrong, and rarely obstructive of right, which yet the governing powers have ever shown a disposition to weaken and remove. Of the first kind, for instance, is freedom of religion; of the second, trial by jury, habeas corpus laws, free presses. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should to rest on inference. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment. | |
| Andrew Johnson | Outside of the Constitution we have no legal authority more than private citizens, and within it we have only so much as that instrument gives us. This broad principle limits all our functions and applies to all subjects. | |
| Lyndon B. Johnson | Free speech, free press, free religion, the right of free assembly, yes, the right of petition... well, they are still radical ideas. | |
| Junius | The Liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman. | |
| Prof. Sanford H. Kadish | It seems as if the Department [of Justice] sees the value of the Bill of Rights as no more than obstacles to be overcome. | |
| John Kaplan | Drug offenses ... may be regarded as the prototypes of non-victim crimes today. The private nature of the sale and use of these drugs has led the police to resort to methods of detection and surveillance that intrude upon our privacy, including illegal search, eavesdropping, and entrapment.
Indeed, the successful prosecution of such cases often requires police infringement of the constitutional protections that safeguard the privacy of individuals. | |
| John Kaplan | We simply do not catch a high enough percentage of users to make the law a real threat, although we do catch enough to seriously overburden our legal system. | |
| John F. Kennedy | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. | |
| John F. Kennedy | I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. | |
| Robert F. Kennedy | At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man... is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society. | |
| 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. | I have a dream that one day ... the sons of former slave owners
will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | 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. | When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!' | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Robert M. Lafollette, Sr. | Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected “radicals” without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail....we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity... | |
| Owen Lattimore | I believe in my right to be wrong, and still more in my right to be right. | |
| Richard Henry Lee | To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. | |
| 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. | |
| A. J. Liebling | Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. | |
| 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 | A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution. | |
| Walter Lippmann | Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right,
the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration. | |
| Walter Lippmann | Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark. | |
| Walter Lippmann | A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. | |
| Walter Lippmann | We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say. | |
| 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. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | 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. | |
| Archibald MacLeish | Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. | |
| James Madison | We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, that religion, or the duty we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. | |
| James Madison | 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. | |
| Matthew 20:15 | Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? | |
| 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. | |
| George McGovern | The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher standard. | |
| 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. | |
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | Let us forget such words, and all they mean, as Hatred, Bitterness and Rancor, Greed, Intolerance, Bigotry. Let us renew our faith and pledge to Man, his right to be Himself, and free. | |
| John Milton | Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. | |
| James Monroe | Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny. | |
| Norval Morris | The prime function of the criminal law is to protect our persons and our property; these purposes are now engulfed in a mass of other distracting, inefficiently performed, legislative duties. When the criminal law invades the spheres of private morality and social welfare, it exceeds its proper limits at the cost of neglecting its primary tasks. This unwarranted extension is expensive, ineffective, and criminogenic. | |
| Lance Morrow | The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance -- a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms -- A Nation of Finger Pointers. | |
| Edward R. Murrow | We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular. | |
| Benito Mussolini | Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power. | |
| National Press Club | In Defense Of Freedom ... (more) | |
| Huey P. Newton | You can jail a Revolutionary, but you can't jail the Revolution. | |
| Huey P. Newton | My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community. | |
| David A. Nichols | As a first-time drug law offender, I was sentenced to 27 non-parolable years in prison. The amount of time was based on liquid waste found in the garage and unprocessed chemicals. There were no drugs. | |
| Robert Nisbet | Very commonly in ages when civil rights of one kind are in evidence – those pertaining to freedom of speech and thought in, say, theater, press, and forum, with obscenity and libel laws correspondingly loosened – very real constrictions of individual liberty take place in other, more vital areas: political organization, voluntary association, property, and the right to hold jobs, for example. | |
| Dr. Fred Oerther | Should we believe self-serving, ever-growing drug enforcement/drug treatment bureaucrats, whose pay and advancement depends on finding more and more people to arrest and "treat"? More Americans die in just one day in prisons, penitentiaries, jails and stockades than have ever died from marijuana throughout history. Who are they protecting? From what? | |
| Walter Olsen | The paternalist project for our civil courts runs something as follows. After the revolution -- which perhaps has already taken place—the average citizen will enjoy a vast array of wonderful new rights to sue other people. You will be empowered to haul your neighbors and fellow citizens to court if you feel they have fallen short of good faith and fair play. You will be entitled to sue them for unlimited damages, punitive as well as compensatory, even over behavior that had previously been thought not subject to liability at all. Everyone will be under a vague but stringent obligation to look out for your safety and welfare, enforceable by legal action. You will enjoy a cornucopia of contention opportunities, a smorgasbord of suing options, a Lotus-land of litigability. | |
| James Otis | There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the Law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free, and they have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves so, if they please. | |
| 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. | |
| Claude Pepper | One has the right to be wrong in a democracy. | |
| Ayn Rand | The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. | |
| Ronald Reagan | It is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work -- work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it. It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. ... We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, not reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory? ... We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inauguration Day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer. | |
| Ernest Renan | To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes. | |
| Lew Rockwell | Even though they are a relatively recent policy development, civil rights laws are considered necessary to insure rights for blacks. But they are, in fact, among the most draconian forms of intervention into the free market. They attack the essence of private property, the ability to exercise control over it. Such laws have resulted in lessened economic freedom, lowered prosperity, heightened social tension, and more trouble for the groups the laws are supposed to help. ... A Korean grocer may want to employ only Korean clerks, a magazine for black professionals only black editors and writers, and a German restaurant only German cooks and waiters. An employer may think that Iraqi-Americans have been unfairly treated and want to favor them. A women’s health club may want only women customer’s and a men’s bar may want only men. There is nothing wrong with any of these behaviors, although civil rights laws seek to end them. In addition to violating the free labor contract, civil rights laws guarantee everyone the right of “access” to “public accommodations” like restaurants, movie theaters, and shops. In fact, what the civil rights laws call public is really private. These businesses are established by private entrepreneurs with private money. The owners should no more be required to serve everyone who comes into their place than they are required to invite everyone to their home for dinner. A large downtown restaurant is as private as a small house in the country. The real difference between private and public is one of ownership, not function or location. | |
| I. Nelson Rose | Lottery tickets are the only consumer products actively promoted and sold by the state. The state does not sell toothpaste, or even promote brushing your teeth. But it tells people they should gamble. The main marketing concern is how to attract new players, who otherwise wouldn't gamble. | |
| Eric Schaub | The 'strength' of the People becomes weak when we don't 'exercise' our rights. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Morris Sheppard | There is as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment as there is for a humming-bird to fly to the planet Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail. | |
| Jerome H. Skolnick | Whether or not legislation is truly moral is often a question of who has the power to define morality. | |
| Adam Smith | Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men. | |
| 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. | |
| Robert D. Specht | Under any conditions, anywhere, whatever you are doing, there is some ordinance under which you can be booked. | |
| Gerry Spence | While birds can fly, only humans can argue. Argument is the affirmation of our being. It is the principal instrument of human intercourse. Without argument the species would perish.\\
As a subtle suggestion, it is the means by which we aid another.\\
As a warning, it steers us from danger.\\
As exposition, it teaches.\\
As an expression of creativity, it is the gift of ourselves.\\
As a protest, it struggles for justice.\\
As a reasoned dialogue, it resolves disputes.\\
As an assertion of self, it engenders respect.\\
As an entreaty of love, it expresses our devotion\\
As a plea, it generates mercy.\\
As charismatic oration it moves multitudes and changes history.\\
We must argue -- to help, to warn, to lead, to love, to create, to learn, to enjoy justice, to be. | |
| Lysander Spooner | If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | The 4th Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion. | |
| Justice Joseph Story | This provision (the 4th Amendment) speaks for itself. Its plain object is to secure the perfect enjoyment of that great right of the common law, that a man's house shall be his own castle, privileged against all civil and military intrusion. | |
| Supreme Court of the United States | Constitutional rights may not be infringed simply because the majority of the people choose that they be. | |
| William Howard Taft | Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race. | |
| Mother Teresa | Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or sovereign. ... You must weep that your own government, at present, seems blind to this truth. | |
| Justice Clarence Thomas | I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | That government is best which governs least. | |
| Lord Chancellor Thurlow | Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and nobody to be kicked? | |
| Laurence Tribe | [The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government. | |
| St. George Tucker | Civil rights, as we may remember, are reducible to three primary heads; the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property. In a state of slavery, the two last are wholly abolished, the person of the slave being at the absolute disposal of his master; and property, what he is incapable, in that state, either of acquiring, or holding, in his own use. Hence, it will appear how perfectly irreconcilable a state of slavery is to the principles of a democracy, which form the basis and foundation of our government. | |
| U. S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25 | Democracy, n.: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic... negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, [chaos]. | |
| Richard A. Viguerie | The first duty of government is to protect the citizen from assault. Unless it does this, all the civil rights and civil liberties in the world aren't worth a dime. | |
| Voltaire | I may not agree with what you say, but to the death I will defend your right to say it. | |
| Voltaire | It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. | |
| Voltaire | We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard. | |
| Voltaire | We are all full of weakness and errors, let us mutually pardon each other our follies. It is the first law of nature. | |
| Voltaire | The tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over the rights of others, and then exercises its power to change the laws in its favor. | |
| Jesse Charles Wagner II | There is one 'word' that the message of the Bible is all about... and that is "LOVE"... different bible versions can be interpreted many ways... But, regardless how many times the wording is changed or interpreted... 'LOVE' always is the 'word' | |
| George Washington | The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend on God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die. | |
| George Washington | If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. | |
| John Wayne | It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something. | |
| Henry Grady Weaver | Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind. | |
| Robert Welch | The real freedom of any individual can always be measured by the amount of responsibility which he must assume for his own welfare and security. | |
| Walt Whitman | The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint.
The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws. | |
| Hank Williams | If you mind your own business, you won't be minding mine. | |
| Wendell L. Willkie | The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens. | |
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