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|  Lord Acton | Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being. | |
| John Adams | The nature of the encroachment upon American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer; it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole of society. | |
| John Adams | Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty. | |
| John Adams | I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself. | |
| Samuel Adams | The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution,
are worth defending at all hazards;
and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.
We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors:
they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure
and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.
It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation,
enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us
by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them
by the artifices of false and designing men. | |
| Samuel Adams | Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. | |
| Aesop | Better to starve free than be a fat slave. | |
| Aesop | No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself. | |
| Spiro Agnew | Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression, and the leaders of various media professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me. That happens to be my amendment, too. It guarantees my free speech as it does their freedom of the press… There is room for all of us – and for our divergent views – under the First Amendment. | |
| Saul Alinsky | A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises. | |
| Corri Alius | Do whatever you can to capture, or recapture, your life spark - unless it harms others, in which case suffer with as much happiness as you can muster. Your nobility of spirit will spark itself. | |
| Lisa Alther | I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic. | |
| Marcus Aurelius Antoninus | Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them. | |
| Michael Badnarik | I have the right to do whatever I wish with my property. If I own a pile of wood, I can set fire to it even if it is currently nailed together in the shape of a barn. Cigarettes may not be healthy for me in the long run, but I have the freedom to smoke them anyway. Drinking alcohol may or may not have negative side effects, but even if it does, the government has no authority to prohibit you from consuming it, even if it is "in your own best interest." Since when do we let the government decide what is or isn't good for us? What the hell does Congress know about nutrition, anyway? (For that matter, what does Congress know about the Constitution?) If the government can use force whenever something is "in our best interest" then government should force everyone to wake up at 6am every morning for calisthenics in the front yard. Fast food establishments should be torn down and replaced with bars that serve carrot juice and alfalfa sprouts, since - "it's in your best interest." This paternalistic attitude that "the government knows best" and that you are merely a helpless child is insulting and reprehensible. Hitler used the same attitude to persuade the Germans to subjugate themselves to the "Fatherland. | |
| Ben H. Bagdikian | Letting a maximum number of views be heard regularly is not just a nice philosophical notion. It is the best way any society has yet discovered to detect maladjustments quickly, to correct injustices, and to discover new ways to meet our continuing stream of novel problems that rise in a changing environment. | |
| Mikhail A. Bakunin | Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him. | |
| Mikhail A. Bakunin | Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it. | |
| Alan Barth | Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism -- including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense; of punishing injustice? | |
| Isaiah Berlin | But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you – the social reformers – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them. | |
| Richard Bernstein | The whole point of the liberal revolution that gave rise to the 1960’s was to free us from somebody else’s dogma, but now the same people…are striving to impose on others a secularized religion…disguising it behind innocuous labels like ‘diversity training’ and ‘respect for difference.’ | |
| Daniel Joseph Berrigan | But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of truth? And more urgently,
how shall we do this in a bad time? | |
| Sir Walter Besant | Tolerance is the eager and glad acceptance of the way along which others seek the truth. | |
| Joseph L. Blau | Freedom of religion means the right of the individual to choose and to adhere to whichever religious beliefs he may prefer, to join with others in religious associations to express these beliefs, and to incur no civil disabilities because of his choice… | |
| Curtis Bok | In the whole history of law and order, the biggest step was taken by primitive man when...the tribe sat in a circle and allowed only one man to speak at a time. An accused who is shouted down has no rights whatever. | |
| William E. Borah | Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen. | |
| William Bradford | If all were to share alike, and all were to do alike, then all were on an equality throughout, and one was as good as another; and so, if it did not actually abolish those very relations which God himself has set among men, it did at least greatly diminish the mutual respect that is so important should be preserved amongst them. Let none argue that this is due to human failing, rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself.... | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | [The founding fathers] conferred, as against the Government, the right to be left alone -- the right most valued by civilized men. | |
| Kingman Brewster | Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure. | |
| Patrick J. Buchanan | The village atheist has the right to be heard; he has no right to be heeded. While he has a right not to have his own children indoctrinated in what he believes are false and foolish teachings, he has no right to dictate what other children may be taught. | |
| Buddha | Friendship is the only cure for hatred, the only guarantee of peace. | |
| Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton | Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness. | |
| Justice Warren E. Burger | There can be no assumption that today’s majority is “right” and the Amish or others like them are “wrong.” A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no right or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different. | |
| Edmund Burke | In a free country every man thinks he has a concern in all public matters,--that he has a right to form and a right to deliver an opinion on them. This it is that fills countries with men of ability in all stations. | |
| Edmund Burke | Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none. | |
| Edmund Burke | All men have equal rights, but not to equal things. | |
| Albert Camus | Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. | |
| Dr. Ben Carson | My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn’t want to be on welfare. She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare, that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that. … But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like. | |
| Jimmy Carter | The law is not the private property of lawyers, nor is justice the exclusive province of judges and juries. In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect. | |
| Jimmy Carter | We are of course a nation of differences. Those differences don’t make us weak. They’re the source of our strength. | |
| Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins. | |
| Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time. | |
| Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | The real value of freedom is not to the minority that wants to talk, but to the majority that does not want to listen. | |
| William Ellery Channing | The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot. | |
| John Jay Chapman | Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own. | |
| Lydia M. Child | Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do. | |
| Rufus Choate | Appropriated to justice, to security, to reason, to restraint; where there is no respect of persons; where will is nothing and power is nothing and numbers are nothing, and all are equal and all secure before the law. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Everybody is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage. | |
| Bill Clinton | The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this problem of...older men who prey on underage women...There are consequences to decisions and...one way or the other, people always wind up being held accountable. | |
| John Cogley | Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them. | |
| Pat Condell | Nobody should be compelled to respect an ideology that doesn’t respect them. | |
| Steven R. Covey | Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside of ourselves will affect us. | |
| Richard Cowan | One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could. | |
| Benedetto Croce | Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human... No people will be truly free till all are free. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. | |
| Steve Dasbach | Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic -- why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students. | |
| Jean de la Bruyere | A wise man neither suffers himself to be governed, nor attempts to govern others. | |
| Salvador De Madariaga | He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power. | |
| Michel De Montaigne | A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | Our First Amendment expresses a far different calculus for regulating speech than for regulating nonexpressive conduct and that is as it should be. The right to swing your fist should end at the tip of my nose, but your right to express your ideas should not necessarily end at the lobes of my ears. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | You know, being black doesn’t give you a license to call people racist any more than being Jewish gives you license to call people anti-Semitic. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | If we move away from the American tradition of lawyers defending those with whom they vehemently disagree -- as we temporarily did during the McCarthy period -- we weaken our commitment to the rule of law... So beware of an approach which limits advocacy to that which is approved by the standards of political correctness. | |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life. | |
| Frederick Douglass | What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? ... Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God -- less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. It assumes that nature has erred; that the law of liberty is a mistake; that freedom, though a natural want of the human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom; that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. What shall be done with them? Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone. | |
| John J. Dunphy | How wonderful the world might be if only we gave to each other all the
love we claim to give to God, a thought which has been expressed time and
time again, yet it still manages to resound with a poignance that is almost
painful. Such a world can be ours, sisters and brothers. Let us work
together to achieve it. | |
| Friedrich Durrenmatt | The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all. | |