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|  Lord Acton | It is bad to be oppressed by a minority,
but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. | |
| John Adams | Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it. | |
| Samuel Adams | The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution,
are worth defending at all hazards;
and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.
We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors:
they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure
and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.
It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation,
enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us
by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them
by the artifices of false and designing men. | |
| Samuel Adams | All Men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please: And in case of intolerable Oppression, civil or religious, to leave the Society they belong to and enter into another. When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary Consent, and they have a Right to demand and insist upon the performance of such Conditions and previous Limitations as form an equitable original Compact. | |
| Felix Adler | Dogma is the convictions of one man imposed authoritatively upon others. | |
| Jonathan H. Adler | Through the rapid proliferation of laws reaching every corner of human existence, “the government is manufacturing more criminals now than ever before.” The list of illegal activities includes more minutiae than one would think possible. Beer-makers are barred from listing alcohol content on bottles, and liquor distilleries cannot advertise on TV. Filling one’s own prairie pothole can land a property owner in jail, as can protecting private property from unlawful intruders. Placing handbills in neighbors’ mailboxes is strictly prohibited, and attempting to sell nectarines of an improper size is a federal offense. Companies are no longer allowed to give salaried professionals partial days off without pay, and in Texas it is a crime to call oneself an interior designer without the government’s permission. It is perhaps easier to recount all that remains legal than all that is now prohibited. | |
| Eli Adorno | Do you think someone who is about to rape you is going to stop and think about a condom? | |
| Aeschylus | Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might. | |
| Alabama, Declaration of Rights Article I Section 35 | That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression. | |
| Woody Allen | We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice. | |
| American Bar Association | It is the duty of the officials to prevent or suppress the threatened disorder with a firm hand instead of timidly yielding to threats…. Surely a speaker ought not to be suppressed because his opponents propose to use violence. It is they who should suffer from their lawlessness, not he. | |
| Hannah Arendt | In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free. | |
| Aristophanes | The wise learn many things from their enemies. | |
| Aristotle | To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these
retain their facility when they are too large. | |
| Margot Asquith | What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it. | |
| Margaret Atwood | The use of “religion” as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time. | |
| Walter Bagehot | Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt. | |
| Mikhail Bakunin | The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation -- which speculates upon the labor of people - will always find the means for its existence. | |
| Hosea Ballou | The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important. | |
| Jerome Barkow | I have great sympathy for the oppressed but I do not expect them to be morally superior to the oppressors. I merely expect them to be oppressed. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its purpose is to protect persons and property.... If you exceed this proper limit -- if you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, or artistic -- you will then be lost in uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it on you. | |
| Dan Baum | It's gotten to where defense attorneys in federal drug cases can do their clients about as much good as Dr. Kevorkian can do his -- quietly shepherd them through to the least painful end. | |
| Rev. Henry Ward Beecher | Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you – the social reformers – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them. | |
| Georges Bernanos | Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. | |
| Andrew Bernstein | Statism – the subordination of the individual to the state -- leads inevitably to the most hideous oppression. | |
| Albert J. Beveridge | Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. | |
| Robert Bidinotto | Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation to the rest of the society. Throughout history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrificed for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was a moral revolution. It was a moral revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being, his property, his happiness became central to our values, and that is what really made America unique. People came here from all over the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. | |
| Steve Biko | The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | Compelling a man by law to pay his money to elect candidates or advocate law or doctrines he is against differs only in degree, if at all, from compelling him by law to speak for a candidate, a party, or a cause he is against. The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress. | |
| Judge Robert Bork | As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago. | |
| Boston Evening Post | [It is] a natural Right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the [English] Bill of rights, to keep arms for their own defense; and as Mr. Blackstone observes, it is to be made use of when the sanctions of Society and law are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression. | |
| James Bovard | The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur. | |
| Anne Bradstreet | Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. | |
| Anne Bradstreet | Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. | |
| Robert Briffault | Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government. | |
| James A. C. Brown | Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority. | |
| Harry Browne | The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it. | |
| Sir Thomas Browne | The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority. | |
| Tammy Bruce | No matter how noble the original intentions, the seductions of power can turn any movement from one seeking equal rights to one that would deny them to others. | |
| Buddha | Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good. | |
| Edmund Burke | People crushed by law have no hope but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous... | |
| Edmund Burke | The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another. | |
| Sir Richard Francis Burton | The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own. | |
| Richard Evelyn Byrd, Sr. | A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man's counting house.... The law will of necessity have inquisical features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it, men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, and detectives will descend upon the state. | |
| John C. Calhoun | A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks. | |
| Albert Camus | The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants. | |
| Albert Camus | Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. | |
| Albert Camus | The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. | |
| Orson Scott Card | Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter. | |
| Justice Benjamin Cardozo | The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles. | |
| John Casey | The growth of drug-related crime is a far greater evil to society as a whole than drug taking. Even so, because we have been seduced by the idea that governments should legislate for our own good, very few people can see how dangerously absurd the present policy is. | |
| Catherine of Siena | Every evil, harm and suffering in this life comes from the love of riches. | |
| Mona Charen | [T]he sprawl of government into every conceivable realm of life has caused the withering of traditional institutions. Fathers become unnecessary if the government provides Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Church charities lose their mission when the government provides food, shelter and income to the poor. And the non-poor no longer feel pressed to provide aid to those in need, be they aged parents or their unfortunate neighbors—“compassion” having become the province of the state. | |
| Nien Cheng | [A]fter unleashing the Red Guards … to serve his political purposes, Mao Zedong was no longer able to control them. | |
| Nien Cheng | Day and night the city resounded with the loud noise of drums and gongs … looting and the ransacking of private homes … The violence of the Red Guards seemed to have escalated. … Articles in the newspapers … encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism. They were … exhorted to be fearless in their work of toppling the old world and building a new one based on Mao’s teachings. | |
| Nien Cheng | The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the ‘Four Olds’: old culture, old customs, old habits, and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of ‘old’; it was left to the Red Guards to decide. First of all, they changed street names. | |
| Dr. G. Brock Chisolm | To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas. | |
| Joseph H. Choate | The Act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended here upon principles as communistic, socialistic - what shall I call them - populistic as ever have been
addressed to any political assembly in the world. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | From the days of Spartacus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxenburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others. | |
| Civil Servants' Year Book | When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed... | |
| Frank Clark | There is nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitor. | |
| Henry Clay | An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters. | |