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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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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		 
This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic--that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.
-- 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.
-- 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 the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts -- the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other. ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone’s account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Truth is sacred and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.
-- 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.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back. … The roots of the new heresy, God knows, are as deep as nature itself, whose power is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life. I say that the man who cannot see this cannot see the signs of the times; cannot see even the skysigns in the street that are the new sort of signs in heaven. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
If our social conditions curtail manhood and womanhood, we must alter the social conditions. We must not go on quietly in a corner making men unmanly and women unwomanly, that they may fit into their filthy and slavish civilization.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton		 
The Rothschilds can start or prevent wars. Their word could make or break empires.
-- Chicago Evening American		 
David Rockefeller, President of Chase Manhattan Bank, briefed President Johnson today on his recent meeting with Premier Nikita Khrushchev of Russia.
-- Chicago Tribune		 
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.
-- Lydia M. Child		 
England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland.
-- Lydia M. Child		 
Prefer a loss to a dishonest gain; for the one is painful but once, but the other for one's whole life.
-- Chilon of Sparta		 
Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
If you stand straight, do not fear a crooked shadow.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever.
-- Chinese Proverb		 
Long before I was ordained a priest, I knew that my church was the most implacable enemy of this republic. My professors … had been unanimous in telling me that the principles and laws of the Church of Rome were absolutely antagonistic to the principles which are the foundation stones of the Constitution of the United States of America.
-- Charles Chiniquy		 
The federal criminal code currently includes more than 3,000 offenses and hardly a congressional session goes by without an attempt to add new sections.
-- Stephen Chippendale		 
It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.
-- Shirley Chisholm		 
In the United States, Sovereignty resides in the people, who act through the organs established by the Constitution.
-- Chisholm v. Georgia		 
What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality - the concept of right and wrong. The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all of psychotherapy.
-- 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.
-- Dr. G. Brock Chisolm		 
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.
-- Joseph H. 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.
-- Rufus Choate		 
At first it was the incomes of corporations, then of rich citizens, then of well-provided widows and opulent workers, and finally the wealth of housemaids and the tips of waitresses. This is all in line with the ability to pay doctrine. The poor, simply because there are more of them, have more ability to pay than the rich.
-- Frank Chodorov		 
If for no other reason, personal pride should prompt every governor and state legislator to take a secessionist attitude; they were not elected to be lackeys of the federal bureaucracy.
-- Frank Chodorov		 
Society thrives on trade simply because trade makes specialization possible, and specialization increases output, and increased output reduces the cost in toil for the satisfactions men live by. That being so, the market place is a most humane institution.
-- Frank Chodorov		 
Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids.
-- Frank Chodorov		 
Increasing the power of the state in response to the Soviet menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but bring it to the United States.
-- Frank Chodorov		 
The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as "free education" is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control.
-- Frank Chodorov		 
Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers.
-- Frank Chodorov		 
[I]n America it is the so-called capitalist who is to blame for the fulfillment of Marx's prophecies. Beguiled by the state's siren song of special privilege, the capitalists have abandoned capitalism.
-- Frank Chodorov		 
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
-- Noam Chomsky		 
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
-- Noam Chomsky		 
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
-- Noam Chomsky		 
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
-- Noam Chomsky		 
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.
-- Noam Chomsky		 
From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought... Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things.
-- Noam Chomsky		 
In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It's hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce.
-- Noam Chomsky		 
Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.
-- Noam Chomsky		 
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media.
-- Noam Chomsky		 
I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
-- Agatha Christie		 
Democracy is essentially coercive. The winner gets to use public authority to impose their policies on the losers.
-- John Chubb		 
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
-- 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		 
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it has been said it is the quality which guarantees all others.
-- Sir Winston Churchill		 
If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.
-- Sir Winston Churchill		 
I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory -- victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
-- Sir Winston Churchill		 
Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death.
-- Sir Winston Churchill		 
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But, it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
-- Sir Winston Churchill		 
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
-- Sir Winston Churchill		 
I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
-- Sir Winston Churchill		 
The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery.
-- Sir Winston Churchill		 
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good … and it would spread a lively terror.
-- 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		 
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
-- Sir Winston Churchill		 


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