Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 

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The freedom to express varying and often opposing ideas is essential to a variety of conceptions of democracy. If democracy is viewed as essentially a process – a way in which collective decisions for a society are made – free expression is crucial to the openness of the process and to such characteristics as elections, representation of interests, and the like.
-- Jonathan D. Casper
 
Ah yes, truth. Funny how everyone is always asking for it but when they get it they don't believe it because it's not the truth they want to hear.
-- Helena Cassadine
 
In the end, legalization of certain substances may be the only way to bring prices down, and doing so may be the only remedy to some of the worst aspects of the drug plague: violence, corruption, and the collapse of the rule of law.
-- Jorge Castañeda
 
We must establish a new world order based on justice, on equity, and on peace.
-- Fidel Castro
 
The problem with political jokes is they get elected.
-- Henry Cate VII
 
The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.
-- Willa Cather
 
Every evil, harm and suffering in this life comes from the love of riches.
-- Catherine of Siena
 
By Liberty I understand the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruits of his Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The Fruits of a Man's honest Industry are the just Rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal Equity, as is his Title to use them in the Manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above Limitations, every Man is sole Lord and Arbitrer of his own private Actions and Property.
-- Cato
 
...I know not what treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason...
-- Cato
 
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.
-- Cato
 
Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing Freedom of Speech... Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech...
-- Cato
 
I must own, I know not what Treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason, in the eternal and original Nature of Things.
-- Cato
 
I would not be beholden to a tyrant, for his acts of tyranny. For it is but usurpation in him to save, as their rightful lord, the lives of men over whom he has no title to reign.
-- Cato the Younger
 
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.
-- Carrie Chapman Catt
 
Most reporters are very sympathetic to gun-control agendas and will skew or lie outright about facts to promote them.
-- Dennis Cauchon
 
Each peso [or dollar] is a contract between the government and the peso holder. That contract guarantees that each peso -- as a unit of value that the holder has worked hard to get -- will be worth as much tomorrow as today. If the government breaks the contract, it's breaking the law. The only role of government in the economy should be to guarantee the integrity of market transactions.
-- Domingo Cavallo
 
There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
-- Dick Cavett
 
As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
-- Dick Cavett
 
It's about food. It’s about your home. It’s about your life. The government is worried about all of the above. All I’m saying is you should be worried they’re worried. Here’s why: They’re telling you that you can’t take care of yourself. You can’t be trusted with what you put in your mouth or what you sign on the mortgage dotted line. So they’ll tell you what to put in your mouth and they’ll save you from what you signed on that dotted line. Does anyone see a trend here? Personal responsibility has now become government responsibility.
-- Neil Cavuto
 
You had me on (before) to talk about the new world order ... I talk about it all the time ... It's one world now ... The council (Council on foreign Relations) can find, nurture and begin to put people in the kinds of jobs this country needs. And that's going to be one of the major enterprises of the Council under me..
-- Les Celb
 
Liberty is one of the choicest gifts that heaven hath bestowed upon man, and exceeds in value all the treasures which the earth contains within its bosom, or the sea covers. Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable.
-- Cervantes
 
There's room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.
-- Aimè Cèsaire
 
Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.
-- 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.
-- 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.
 
Freedom from something is not enough. It should also be freedom for something. Freedom is not safety but opportunity. Freedom ought to be a means to enable the press to serve the proper functions of communication in a free society.
-- 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.
-- Zechariah Chafee, Jr.
 
The majority of us are for free speech when it deals with subjects concerning which we have no intense feelings.
-- Edmund B. Chaffee
 
One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle-class families of financial reserves. [It] has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State.
-- W. H. Chamberlin
 
One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves & seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized every thing. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State & more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic & social system.
-- W. H. Chamberlin
 
The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.
-- Whittaker Chambers
 
Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.
-- Nicolas-Sebasstien Chamfort
 
Now the 21st century approaches and with it the inevitability of change. We must wonder if the American people will find renewal and rejuvenation within themselves, will discover again their capacity for innovation and adaptation. If not, alas, the nation's future will be shaped by sightless forces of history over which Americans will have no control.
-- John Chancellor
 
Once we start to worry too often and too deeply about what certain individuals and what certain groups think about us, then we might start selling our souls for the sake of expediency.
-- Otis Chandler
 
The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
-- Raymond Chandler
 
He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.
-- Raymond Chandler
 
Money for me has only one sound: liberty.
-- Gabrielle Chanel
 
The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people's energy, intellect, and virtues.
-- 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.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
I call the mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith...
-- William Ellery Channing
 
Knowledge is essential to freedom.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
Progress, the growth of power, is the end and boon of liberty; and, without this, a people may have the name, but want the substance and spirit of freedom.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions.
-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin
 
At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.
-- E. H. Chapin
 
Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own.
-- John Jay Chapman
 
Our duty, as men and women is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
 
[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.
-- Mona Charen
 
The people's liberties strengthen the king's prerogative, and the king's prerogative is to defend the people's liberties.
-- Charles I
 
Never make a defence or apology before you be accused.
-- Charles I
 
The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened by convictions.
-- Alexander Chase
 
Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for it's own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one's thoughts.
-- Mary Ellen Chase
 
The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty.
-- Justice Salmon Chase
 
If Congress sees fit to impose a capitation, or other direct tax, it must be laid in proportion to the census; if Congress determines to impose duties, imposts, and excises, they must be uniform throughout the United States. These are not strictly limitations of power. They are rules prescribing the mode in which it shall be exercised. ... This review shows that personal property, contracts, occupations, and the like have never been regarded by Congress as proper subjects of direct tax.
-- Salmon P. Chase
 
The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts.
-- Samuel Chase
 
The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts.
-- Samuel Chase
 
For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.
-- Stuart Chase
 
It will be necessary for us to be a nation of men, and not laws.
-- Dick Cheney (False)
 
The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.
-- Dick Cheney
 
[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.
-- Nien Cheng
 
Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step.
-- Lord Chesterfield
 
It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.
-- 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
 
Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
In the end it will not matter to us whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 


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