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|  Sir Francis Bacon | Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. | |
| Christiaan Barnard | I don't believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance human life. As fast as we create ways to extend it we are inventing ways to shorten it. | |
| 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. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. | |
| Hillary Clinton | Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. | |
| Hillary Clinton | We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society. | |
| Bertrand de Jouvenel | Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | Rights are not self-evident. They're not unalienable.
They are subject to modification just like anything else. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | We, the People of this country, have no unalienable rights... all our rights are subject to modification... the Constitution of the United States of America is nothing more than a piece of paper and... our government should not be restrained by the Constitution because our government can do good things for people. | |
| Will Durant | Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. | |
| Cat Farmer | If you suppose that good intentions justify intruding on the lives and properties of your fellow citizens: Do you appreciate being the target of somebody else's good intentions, or haven't you had that particular dubious pleasure yet? | |
| Khalil Gibran | Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts. | |
| Joseph Paul Goebbels | To be a socialist is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once. | |
| Adolf Hitler | The unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual. | |
| Sergei Hoff | Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ...as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities? | |
| John Holt | People who make careers out of helping others -- sometimes at great sacrifice, often not -- usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help. | |
| Robert M. Hutchins | A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues…is on the way to totalitarianism and death. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. | |
| Molly Ivins | It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it. | |
| Garrison Keillor | You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion. | |
| John Maynard Keynes | The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth -- he could at the same time and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any quarter of the world -- he could secure forthwith, if he wished, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality. | |
| Kathe Kollwitz | I was put in this world to change it. | |
| 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. | |
| Late 16th Century Proverb | The road to hell is paved with good intentions. | |
| Paul F. Lazarsfeld | It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him. | |
| Doris Lessing | Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | It is the eternal struggle between these two principles - right and wrong - throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time... | |
| H. L. Mencken | People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. | |
| Thomas Merton | The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no sins because all the sinners have been wiped out. | |
| 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. | |
| Molière | It is madness beyond compare To try to reform the world. | |
| Thomas Molnar | Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind’s totalization may flounder. | |
| Thomas Molnar | Uniformity, therefore, is an essential built-in element of utopian existence, and it is no less important that this uniformity remain permanent. | |
| Charles W. Moore | If the political-correctness fascists get their way, we can safely assume it will be correct-thinking, “political cleansing” squads deciding what we can or cannot say on the Intenet. These people fear public debate and demand homogenization of “acceptable” attitudes compatible with their emotional, utopian idealism. | |
| Daniel Patrick Moynihan | When a person goes to a country and finds their newspapers filled with nothing but good news, he can bet there are good men in jail. | |
| Archibald D. Murphey | It is important therefore that in these schools the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated, and habits of subordination and obedience formed. One of the greatest blessings which the State can confer upon her children is to instill into their minds at an early period moral and religious truths. ... Thousands of unfortunate children are growing up in perfect ignorance of their moral and religious duties. Their parents equally unfortunate know not how to instruct them, and have not the opportunity or ability of placing them under the care of those who could give them instruction. The State, in the warmth of her affection and solicitude for their welfare, must take charge of those children and place them in schools where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts can be trained to virtue. | |
| Barack Hussein Obama | When Michelle and I decided that I would run for President,
it was because of a shared belief in the power of community and connection,
a commitment to the idea that we are our brothers' keepers. | |
| Carl Rogers | The issues can be stated very briefly: Who will be controlled? Who will exercise control? What type of control will be exercised? Most important of all, toward what end or purpose, or in the pursuit of what value, will control be exercised? | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. | |
| Albert Schweitzer | I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end. | |
| Socrates | I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world. | |
| Thomas Sowell | To include freedom in the very definition of democracy is to define a process not by its actual characteristics as a process but by its hoped for results. This is not only intellectually invalid, it is, in practical terms, blinding oneself in advance to some of the unwanted consequences of the process. | |
| Max Stirner | A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists. | |
| Jonathan Swift | Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can. | |
| Michael Taylor | ... I suggest that the more the state intervenes in such situations, the more 'necessary' (on this view) it becomes, because positive altruism and voluntary cooperative behaviour atrophy in the presence of the state and grow in its absence. Thus, again, the state exacerbates the conditions which are supposed to make it necessary. We might say that the state is like an addictive drug: the more of it we have, the more we 'need' it and the more we come to 'depend' on it. | |
| Pierre Trudeau | As against the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, there has to be a visible hand of politicians whose objective is to have the kind of society that is caring and humane. | |
| Chad Walsh | From the utopian viewpoint, the United States constitution is a singularly hard-bitten and cautious document, for it breathes the spirit of skepticism about human altruism and incorporates a complex system of checks, balances and restrictions, so that everybody is holding the reins on everybody else. | |
| Rear Admiral Chester Ward | The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations
is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and
national independence and submergence into an all powerful,
one world government. | |
| 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. | |
| Daniel Webster | The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. | |