The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations A classic since 1953 with over 20,000 quotes from over 3,000 authors.
Famous Last Words Apt Observations, Pleas, Curses, Benedictions, Sour Notes, Bons Mots, and Insights from People on the Brink of Departure
Stretch Your Wings Famous Black Quotations for the Young
American Quotations An exhaustive collection of profound quotes from the founding fathers, presidents, statesmen, scientists, constitutions, court decisions
The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations
Last Words of Saints and Sinners 700 Final Quotes from the Famous, the Infamous, and the Inspiring Figures of History
America's God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations Contains over 2,100 profound quotations from founding fathers, presidents, constitutions, court decisions and more
The Law This 1850 classic is an absolute must read for anyone interested in law, justice, truth, or liberty. A most compelling and revolutionary look at The Law.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition)
The Stupidest Things Ever Said by Politicians Rise up, America -- and laugh out loud at the greatest gaffes that no spin doctor could possibly fix!
The 776 Even Stupider Things Ever Said Another great collection of stupidity
Quotable Quotes Wit and Wisdom for All Occasions from America's Most Popular Magazine
The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time You don't have to be a genius to sound like one. Here's a collection of the most profound and provocative wit and wisdom in the English language in two lines or less.
2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs Invaluable sampler of witticisms, epigrams, sayings, bon mots, platitudes and insights chosen for their brevity and pithiness.
Phillips' Book of Great Thoughts Funny Sayings A stupendous collection of quotes, quips, epigrams, witticisms, and humorous comments for personal enjoyment and ready reference.
Quick Quips and Quotes; 532 Things I Wish I Had Said Quick Quips and Quotes is the Ultimate Collection of one liners.
Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes The ultimate anthology of anecdotes, now revised with over 700 new entries.
Quotations for Public Speakers A Historical, Literary, and Political Anthology
Liberty - The American Revolution This compelling series traces the events leading up to the war and America's fight for freedom.
Founding Fathers The story of how these disparate characters fomented rebellion in the colonies, formed the Continental Congress, fought the Revolutionary War, and wrote the Constitution
Libertarianism: A Primer David Boaz, director of the Cato Institute, has written a simple introduction to Libertarianism inteneded to appeal to disgruntled Democrats and Republicans everywhere.
The Libertarian Reader Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman
Thomas Paine: Collected Writings All the classics: Common Sense / The Crisis / Rights of Man / The Age of Reason / Pamphlets, Articles, and Letters |
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| William Barr | It is easier to run away from a local tyranny than a national one. … [I]f it is one size fits all – if every congressional enactment or Supreme Court decision establishes a single rule for every American – then the stakes are very high as to what that rule is. | |
| William Barr | When the entire press ‘advances along the same track,’ as Tocqueville put it, the relationship between the press and the energized majority becomes mutually reinforcing. Not only does it become easier for the press to mobilize a majority, but the mobilized majority becomes more powerful and overweening with the press as its ally. This is not a positive cycle, and I think it is fair to say that it puts the press’s role as a breakwater for the tyranny of the majority in jeopardy. The key to restoring the press in that vital role is to cultivate a greater diversity of voices in the media. | |
| William Barr | Today in the United States, the corporate – or ‘mainstream’ – press is massively consolidated. And it has become remarkably monolithic in viewpoint, at the same time that an increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change. | |
| William Barr | Although totalitarian democracy is democratic in form, it requires an all-knowing elite to guide the masses toward their determined end, and that elite relies on whipping up mass enthusiasm to preserve its power and achieve its goals. Totalitarian democracy is almost always secular and materialistic, and its adherents tend to treat politics as a substitute for religion. Their sacred mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society according to an abstract ideal of perfection. | |
| William Barr | These developments have given the press an unprecedented ability to mobilize a broad segment of the public on a national scale and direct that opinion in a particular direction. | |
| William Barr | The Framers would have seen a one-size-fits-all government for hundreds of millions of diverse citizens as being utterly unworkable and a straight road to tyranny. That is because they recognized that not every community is exactly the same. What works in Brooklyn might not be a good fit for Birmingham. The federal system allows for this diversity. It also enables people who do not like a certain system to move to a different one. | |
| Howard Beale | So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television's a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business... We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. | |
| Nathaniel Branden | Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism -- the belief that the individual exists to serve others -- is translated into political reality. | |
| George W. Bush | We will fight with full force and might of the United States military. | |
| George W. Bush | There will be no going back to the era before September 11th, 2001, to false comfort in a dangerous world. | |
| George W. Bush | Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. | |
| Samuel Butler | He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still. | |
| Major General Smedley Darlington Butler | My mental faculties remained in suspended animation
while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups.
This is typical with everyone in the military. | |
| James Carville | The Democratic constituency is just like a herd of cows. All you have to do is lay out enough silage and they come running. That’s why I became an operative working with Democrats. With Democrats all you have to do is make a lot of noise, lay out the hay, and be ready to use the ole cattle prod in case a few want to bolt the herd. | |
| Carrie Chapman Catt | There are two kinds of restrictions on human liberty -- the restraint of law and that of custom. No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves. | |
| John Chubb | Democracy is essentially coercive. The winner gets to use public authority to impose their policies on the losers. | |
| Edward H. Crane | [T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state -- what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations -- what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force. | |
| e. e. cummings | To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. | |
| Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis | Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings
for making everything compulsory
that isn't forbidden. | |
| Milovan Djilas | [Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own. | |
| 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. | |
| 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? | |
| Milton Friedman | Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. | |
| James Anthony Froude | To deny freedom of the will is to make morality impossible. | |
| Rick Gaber | Many academicians and self-styled intellectuals, with a habitually arrogant and condescending attitude, treat the rest of the world with contempt. These so-called 'intelligentsia' congratulate themselves for, not only having high IQs and lots of education in their particular fields, but for having achieved the allegedly momentous insight that free-market capitalism and pure altruism are ultimately incompatible (duh). Yet they're still too damned stupid to realize, and too damned ignorant to acknowledge, that altruism is NOT the only moral code available to mankind. (It is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all). This stunted thinking has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion. | |
| Rick Gaber | Always remember the difference between economic power and political power: You can refuse to hire someone's services or buy his products in the private sector and go somewhere else instead. In the public sector, though, if you refuse to accept a politician's or bureaucrat's product or services you go to jail. Ultimately, after all, all regulations are observed and all taxes are paid at gunpoint. I believe those few who can't even see that have been short-sighted sheep, and I suggest they learn how to think conceptually, develop consistency and grasp principles soon. | |
| William Lloyd Garrison | No man shall rule over me with my consent. I will rule over no man. | |
| John Taylor Gatto | Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.... | |
| William Godwin | Government will not fail to employ education to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions. | |
| William Godwin | Let us consider the effect that coercion produces upon the mind of him against whom it is employed. It cannot begin with convincing; it is no argument. It begins with producing the sensation of pain, and the sentiment of distaste. It begins with violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. It includes in it a tacit confession of imbecility. If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is important, but he really punishes me because his argument is weak. | |
| Richard Goldstein | To subject an artist’s work to a litmus test of political probity – and to punish institutions that will not carry out the mandate of the state – is to traffic in the thought control that gave us Stalinism and Nazism… | |
| A. Whitney Griswold | Certain things we cannot accomplish… by any process of government. We cannot legislate intelligence. We cannot legislate morality. No, and we cannot legislate loyalty, for loyalty is a kind of morality. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule. | |
| 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. | |
| Auberon Herbert | ... every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive. | |
| Eric Hoffer | To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats -- we know it not. | |
| Eric Hoffer | Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay. | |
| John Holt | No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back. | |
| Horace | Force without wisdom falls of its own weight. | |
| Philip K. Howard | Coercion by government, the main fear of our founding fathers, is now its most common attribute. | |
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