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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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Free speech is essential to education, especially to a liberal education, which encourages the search for truths in art and science. If expression is restricted, the range of inquiry is also curtailed... The beneficiaries of a free society have a duty to pursue the truth and to protect the freedom of expression that makes possible the search for a new enlightenment.
-- Norman Dorsen		 
Individuality is freedom lived.
-- John Dos Passos		 
The reality is, if we tell the truth, we only have to tell the truth once. If you lie, you have to keep lying forever.
-- Rabbi Wayne Dosick		 
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.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky		 
It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky		 
Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky		 
The head of the powerful Jesuit Order (Father Pedro Arrupe) charged today (Sept. 27) that atheism constitutes a conspiracy that has infiltrated even the Roman Catholic Church and virtually controls international organizations, finance, and mass communications. … [Father Pedro Arrupe said that] “the new godless society operates in an extremely efficient manner, at least in its higher levels of leadership. It makes use of every possible means at its disposal, be they scientific, technical, social, or economic. It follows a perfectly mapped-out strategy. It holds almost complete sway in international organizations, in financial circles, in the field of mass communications: press, cinema, radio, and television.” … Father Arrupe, as head of the 36,000-member Jesuit Order, is considered to be one of the half-dozen most influential churchmen in the world, as indicated by his informal title of “Black Pope.”
-- Robert Doty		 
Yes; truth blends well with untruth. It is one of the maladies of our age, a sign of sheer nervousness, to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.
-- Norman Douglas		 
It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The First Amendment makes confidence in the common sense of our people and in the maturity of their judgment the great postulate of our democracy.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.
-- 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.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall. His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
These unwritten amenities have been in part responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits rather than hushed, suffocating silence.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and…the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression and obedience.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. It is one of the great landmarks in men’s struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.
-- William O. Douglas		 
But our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas; that is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Heresy trials are foreign to our Constitution. Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.
-- William O. Douglas		 
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are ... the right to believe what one chooses, the right to differ from his neighbor, the right to pick and choose the political philosophy he likes best, the right to associate with whomever he chooses, the right to join groups he prefers ...
-- William O. Douglas		 
I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views – towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues – has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform…not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?
-- William O. Douglas		 
The First and Fourteenth Amendments say that Congress and the States shall make “no law” which abridges freedom of speech or of the press. In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that “no law” does not mean what it says, that “no law” is qualified to mean “some” laws. I cannot take this step.
-- William O. Douglas		 
A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.
-- William O. Douglas		 
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
The non-producers now receive the larger share of what those who labor produce. The result is natural. Discontent culminates in exactly the same ratio that intelligence sustains aspiration.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
I have no sympathy for the narrow, selfish notion of economy which assumes that every crumb of bread which goes into the mouth of one class is so much taken from the mouths of another class.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
He who would be free must strike the first blow.
-- 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.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting, and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Any one having a white face, and being so disposed, could stop us, and subject us to examination. ... When I get there [in Pennsylvania], I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
... and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
What is possible for me is possible for you.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document!
-- Frederick Douglass		 
We must protect the freedoms of even those who hate us, and that we may find objectionable. If we fail in this task, we become victims of the precedents we create.
-- Judge Robert Doumar		 
History teaches us the unfortunate lesson that cultural values supplant constitutional rights whenever the cultural elite consider a right too burdensome to suit the needs of the moment. The outlandish pronouncement in Dred Scott "that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit," the shameful court-approved internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the separate but equal doctrine that officially existed until 1954 are all examples of the evils that result when cultural values are given more weight than constitutional rights.
-- Robert Dowlut		 
Judicial minds have systematically rejected arguments that clashed with their ideologies. Consequently, the forum of last resort has not checked the excesses of the executive and legislative branches.
-- Robert Dowlut		 
Because this right [of self-defense] cannot be effectively exercised with bare hands, the right to keep and bear arms is the only efficient way to secure the fundamental right of self-defense.
-- Robert Dowlut		 
[R]estricting arms to the military and police eviscerates the principle that power should flow from the people to government, and turns the government into a master rather than a servant.
-- Robert Dowlut		 
Gun control stems from racist roots, and ... it undermines feminism by send[ing] women the message that they should not use force to defend themselves.
-- Robert Dowlut		 
[W]e continue to evolve a cute little concept of a changing legal accommodation named the “Living Constitution Theory” which is only a perversion stating, “To heck with what our Constitution says; we in power will twist it to suit our ideas anytime and every time we so choose.”
-- Dr. Jack Down		 
The federal government has turned policing into policing for profit.
-- Stephen Downing		 


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