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When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
-- Clarence S. Darrow | |
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The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.
-- Clarence S. Darrow | |
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To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.
-- Charles Darwin | |
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False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
-- Charles Darwin | |
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The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.
-- Charles Darwin | |
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The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal.
-- Charles Darwin | |
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Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
-- Charles Darwin | |
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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.
-- Steve Dasbach | |
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If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.
-- Ram Dass | |
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When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.
-- James Dale Davidson | |
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The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless.
-- James Dale Davidson | |
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So low and hopeless are the finances of the United States, that, the year before last Congress was obliged to borrow money even, to pay the interest of the principal which we had borrowed before. This wretched resource of turning interest into principal, is the most humiliating and disgraceful measure that a nation could take, and approximates with rapidity to absolute ruin: Yet it is the inevitable and certain consequence of such a system as the existing Confederation.
-- William Richardson Davie | |
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The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people,
equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection
all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.
No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences,
was ever invented by the wit of man than
that any of its provisions can be suspended
during any of the great exigencies of government.
Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism,
but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false;
for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it,
which are necessary to preserve its existence;
as has been happily proved by the result
of the great effort to throw off its just authority.
-- Justice David Davis | |
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The Republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it ...
This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.
-- Elmer Davis | |
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This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle – among others – that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error; that in the competition of the marketplace of ideas, the sounder ideas will in the long run win out.
-- Elmer Davis | |
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The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it.
-- Elmer Davis | |
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Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.
-- Jefferson Davis | |
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It is ironic that our government, which has been relentlessly critical of the messages that popular culture imparts to our youth, would seek to silence an artist who uses the medium of hip hop to preach a message of self respect and self reliance to young women and girls.
-- Lisa E. Davis | |
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Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings
for making everything compulsory
that isn't forbidden.
-- Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis | |
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Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
-- Richard Dawkins | |
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You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal.
-- John De Armond | |
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There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
-- Honoré de Balzac | |
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Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.
-- Honore de Balzac | |
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Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
-- Honore de Balzac | |
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I claim for the nation an education that depends only on the State, because children of the State must be raised by members of the State.
-- Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais | |
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It is the part of wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket.
-- Miguel de Cervantes | |
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Society is composed of two great classes - those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
-- Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort | |
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The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of pleasures.
-- Luc de Clapiers | |
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Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license,” and they will define freedom out of existence.
-- Voltairine de Cleyre | |
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The revolution is ... the blow dealt ... against the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty.
-- Voltairine de Cleyre | |
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...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
-- Voltairine de Cleyre | |
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In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
-- Charles de Gaulle | |
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Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.
-- Charles De Gaulle | |
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I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
-- Charles De Gaulle | |
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In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
-- Charles de Gaulle | |
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The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
-- Remy De Gourmont | |
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Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free.
-- Remy de Gourmont | |
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A large number of people, certainly the majority of the political looter class, think the best way to deal with the rapidly deepening economic crisis is via 'stimulus packages' with money plucked off the magic money tree... which is to say, by trying to re-inflate the credit bubble that actually caused the crisis. This is a bit like treating alcoholics by urging them to buy more whiskey.
-- Perry de Havilland | |
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I have often lamented that with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the forces of liberalism did not spend nearly enough time ruthlessly driving intellectual stakes through the hearts of all those who supported the 'Evil Empire' or preached appeasement or claimed that the Soviet system was 'just another way of living' rather than a mass murderous tyranny.
-- Perry de Havilland | |
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The Radical Centre seem to have the same obsession with control that the fascists and communists had, but unlike them, it is control for control's sake rather than in the service of some clear ideology ... They do not seek the triumph of Volk or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they just seek to replace all social interactions with politically mediated interactions. They seek to regulate everything via a total state that ... just wants a world in which nothing whatsoever is private, everything is political. Their symbol is not the Hammer and Sickle or the Swastika, it is the CCTV camera.
-- Perry de Havilland | |
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... the smaller the domain where choices among alternatives are made collectively, the smaller will be the probability that any individual's preference gets overruled.
-- Anthony de Jasay | |
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People who live in states have as a rule never experienced the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical possibility of moving from the one to the other ... On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses about the relative merits of state and state of nature? ... My contention here is that preferences for political arrangements of society are to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that political institutions are either addictive like some drugs, or allergy-inducing like some others, or both, for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others.
-- Anthony de Jasay | |
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Self-imposed limits on sovereign power can disarm mistrust, but provide no guarantee of liberty and property beyond those afforded by the balance between state and private force.
-- Anthony de Jasay | |
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In the process of helping some (perhaps most) people to more utility and justice, the state imposes on civil society a system of interdictions and commands.
-- Anthony de Jasay | |
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Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure.
-- Anthony de Jasay | |
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People who live in states have as a rule never experienced
the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical
possibility of moving from the one to the other ...
On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses
about the relative merits of state and state of nature? ...
My contention here is that preferences for political arrangements of society are
to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that
political institutions are either addictive like some drugs,
or allergy-inducing like some others, or both,
for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others.
-- Anthony de Jasay | |
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Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel | |
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A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel | |
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A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel | |
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The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel | |
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However, there is satisfaction in examining what they get out of all this torment, what advantage they derive from all the trouble of their wretched existence. Actually the people never blame the tyrant for the evils they suffer, but they do place responsibility on those who influence him; peoples, nations, all compete with one another, even the peasants, even the tillers of the soil, in mentioning the names of the favorites, in analyzing their vices, and heaping upon them a thousand insults, a thousand obscenities, a thousand maledictions. All their prayers, all their vows are directed against these persons; they hold them accountable for all their misfortunes, their pestilences, their famines; and if at times they show them outward respect, at those very moments they are fuming in their hearts and hold them in greater horror than wild beasts. This is the glory and honor heaped upon influential favorites for their services by people who, if they could tear apart their living bodies, would still clamor for more, only half satiated by the agony they might behold. For even when the favorites are dead those who live after are never too lazy to blacken the names of these people-eaters with the ink of a thousand pens, tear their reputations into bits in a thousand books, and drag, so to speak, their bones past posterity, forever punishing them after their death for their wicked lives.
-- Estienne de la Boétie | |
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Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.
-- Étienne de la Boétie | |
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It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.
-- Etienne de la Boétie | |
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A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob; an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen.
-- Jean de la Bruyere | |
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A wise man neither suffers himself to be governed, nor attempts to govern others.
-- Jean de la Bruyere | |
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O liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name!
[Fr., O liberte! que de crimes on commet dans ton nom!]
-- Madame Jeanne Marie Phlipon de La Platiere Roland | |
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Everyone complains of his memory, none of his judgment.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | |
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Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | |
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We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | |
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Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | |
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Love of justice in the generality of men is only the fear of suffering from injustice.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | |
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Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | |
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Nothing is given so profusely as advice.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | |
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Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | |
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A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | |
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Republicanism and ignorance are in bitter antagonism.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine | |
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Void of freedom, what would virtue be?
-- Alphonse de Lamartine | |
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At twenty every one is republican.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine | |
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There is in human affairs one order which is best. That order is not always the one which exists; but it is the order which should exist for the greatest good of humanity. God knows, it and will it: man's duty it is to discover and establish it.
-- Emile Louis Victor de Laveleye | |
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No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies.
-- Salvador de Madariaga | |
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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.
-- Salvador De Madariaga | |
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He is free who knows how to keep in his own hand 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.
-- Salvador de Madariaga | |
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Every nation gets the government it deserves.
-- Joseph de Maistre | |
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To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.
-- Michel De Montaigne | |
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It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration -- nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.
-- Michel De Montaigne | |
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A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.
-- Michel de Montaigne | |
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I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can.
-- Michel de Montaigne | |
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Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other.
-- Michel de Montaigne | |
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Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another's net.
-- Michel De Montaigne | |
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I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.
-- Michel de Montaigne | |
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A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom.
-- Michel De Montaigne | |
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If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
-- Michel De Montaigne | |
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Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
-- Michel de Montaigne | |
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I quote others only the better to express myself.
-- Michel De Montaigne | |
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There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thought under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
-- Michel de Montaigne | |
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I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
-- Michel de Montaigne | |
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If falsehood like truth had only one face, we would be in better shape. For we would take as certain the opposite of what the liar said. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.
-- Michel de Montaigne | |
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Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
-- Michel De Montaigne | |
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I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so.
-- Michel De Montaigne | |
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He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying.
-- Michel de Montaigne | |
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It is unreasonable ... to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life.
-- Charles de Montesquieu | |
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The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
-- Charles de Montesquieu | |
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Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.
[Fr., Les republiques finissent par le luxe; les monarchies, par la pauvrete.]
-- Charles de Montesquieu | |
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In the state of nature...all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.
-- Charles de Montesquieu | |
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There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
-- Charles de Montesquieu | |
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Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.
-- Charles de Montesquieu | |
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Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits.
-- Louis Charles Alfred de Musset | |
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The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.
-- Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre | |
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The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance.
-- Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre | |
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The evil of democracy is not the triumph of quantity, but the triumph of bad quality.
-- Guido De Ruggiero | |