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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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The federal government has turned policing into policing for profit.
-- Stephen Downing		 
I think it might be important to point out that this country is a one-party country. Half of that party is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn’t make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians.
-- Hugh Downs		 
You will ruin no more lives as you ruined mine. You will wring no more hearts as you wrung mine. I will free the world of a poisonous thing. Take that, you hound, and that! -- and that! -- and that! -- and that!
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle		 
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle		 
When books are challenged, restricted, removed, or banned, an atmosphere of suppression exists…. The fear of the consequences of censorship is as damaging as, or perhaps more damaging than, the actual censorship attempt. After all, when a published work is banned, it can usually be found elsewhere. Unexpressed ideas, unpublished works, unpurchased books are lost forever.
-- Robert P. Doyle		 
Some methodological atheists formulate the principle by saying that the burden of proof is always on any person making an existence claim, since, from a logical point of view, existence claims are only capable of proof, not disproof. No one has ever proven the nonexistence of Santa Claus, or elves, or unicorns, or anything else, simply because the very logic of an unrestricted existential proposition prohibits its disproof. It is impossible to go all over the universe and show that, for example, there are no elves anywhere. For this reason, rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of all those things which have never been shown to exist. That is why we all regard it rational to deny the existence of Santa Claus, elves, unicorns, etc. And since God is in that same category, having never been shown to exist, it follows that rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of God.
-- Theodore M. Drange		 
If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?
-- William Drayton		 
Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.
-- Peter Drucker		 
The most may err as grossly as the few.
-- John Dryden		 
We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what they help distribute to the public; by which means a falsehood once received from a famed writer becomes traditional to posterity.
-- John Dryden		 
I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
-- John Dryden		 
Of all the tyrannies on human kind / the worst is that which persecutes the mind.
-- John Dryden		 
War is the trade of Kings.
-- John Dryden		 
Ill habits gather by unseen degrees -- As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
-- John Dryden		 
Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare.
-- John Dryden		 
The love of liberty with life is given, And life itself the inferior gift of Heaven.
-- John Dryden		 
O freedom, first delight of human kind!
-- John Dryden		 
It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois		 
The cost of liberty is less than the cost of repression.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois		 
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois		 
Gun control has not worked in D.C. The only people who have guns are criminals. We have the strictest gun laws in the nation and one of the highest murder rates. It's quicker to pull your Smith and Wesson than to dial 911 if you're being robbed.
-- Lt. Lowell Duckett		 
There can be no peace on earth as long as there is war in love.
-- Dieter Duhm		 
Somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor.
-- John Foster Dulles		 
Of all the tasks of government, the most basic is to protect its citizens from violence.
-- John Foster Dulles		 
Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
-- Alexandre Dumas		 
The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a "psychological confession" on their part. In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive.
-- Wayne Dunn		 
There was a time when Christians took faith as seriously as Mid-Eastern Muslims currently do: the Medieval Era.
-- Wayne Dunn		 
The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a 'psychological confession' on their part.  In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive.
-- Wayne Dunn		 
An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court.
-- Finley Peter Dunne		 
There exist in the world only two great parties; that of those who prefer to live from the produce of their labor or of their property, and that of those who prefer to live on the labor or the property of others.
-- Charles Dunoyer		 
The concept of a Supreme Being who childishly demands to be constantly placated by prayers and sacrifice and dispenses justice like some corrupt petty judge whose decisions may be swayed by a bit of well-timed flattery should be relegated to the trash bin of history, along with the belief in a flat earth and the notion that diseases are caused by demonic possession. Ironically, the case for the involuntary retirement of God may have been best stated by one Saul or Paul of Tarsus, a first-century tentmaker and Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin, who wrote, 'When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things' (I Corinthians 13:11). Those words are no less relevant today than they were two thousand years ago.
-- 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.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being... The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and new -- the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent with the promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of 'love thy neighbor' will finally be achieved.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
I steadfastly maintain that only with the complete, irrevocable rejection of God and the supernatural will humankind truly begin to live. Rather than producing a feeling of despair, the decision to embrace atheism should result in an exhilarating, almost intoxicating sense of freedom, something akin to the experience of those American slaves who rejoiced upon hearing news of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Only the atheist is truly free.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
The history of Christianity has been largely written in blood, the blood of those whom it has sought to proselytize as well as that of those Christians who did not share the theology or ambitions of the male clerical oligarchy that has always wielded power in Christendom. This ignoble distinction is not nor has it ever been the exclusive prerogative of any particular denomination or sect; it is a living legacy of horror that is tragically common to the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox bodies of Christian churches.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
If the previous paragraphs [of 'A Religion For A New Age'] prove anything, it is that the Bible is not merely another book, an outmoded and archaic book, or even an extremely influential book; it has been and remains an incredibly dangerous book. It and the various Christian churches which are parasitic upon it have been directly responsible for most of the wars, persecutions and outrages which humankind has perpetrated upon itself over the past two thousand years.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
A liberal's like to be lax\\When recommending a tax.\\With a glut in his heart\\And his brain low a quart,\\He will give you\\the shirts off our backs.
-- F. R. Duplantier		 
If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.
-- Will Durant		 
In my youth, I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
-- Will Durant		 
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.
-- Will Durant		 
Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.
-- Will Durant		 
[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
-- Will Durant		 
Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt -- particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms.
-- Will Durant		 
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.
-- Will Durant		 
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.
-- Will Durant		 
Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?
-- Jimmy Durante		 
The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all.
-- Friedrich Durrenmatt		 
Criminal lawyer. Or is that redundant?
-- Will Durst		 
I did not use paint, I made myself up morally.
-- Eleanora Duse		 
Unless a crime is specifically named in the constitution, treason and bribery, impeachments like indictments can only be instituted for crimes committed against the statutory law of the United States.
-- Theodore William Dwight		 
Hamilton's whole monetary policy is based on unconstitutional grounds and unsound reasoning, and fraudulent statements. His policies were fought through the whole public career of Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph and many another truly great lovers of Republican Government. His policies have proved to be more destructive of our independent and democratic form of government than the old subjugation of the Colonies by Great Britain. The deliberations in Congress over Hamilton's Bank Bill, and the opinions of members of The Cabinet show the intensity of feeling between the private money interests and those supporting the Constitution. History records that the “money changers” have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.
-- Olive Cushing Dwinell		 
‘Balanced’ is a code for ‘denied’: a right to free speech that must be ‘balanced’ against so exhaustive a list of other supposed values means a right that can be exercised only when those in power judge that the speech in question is innocuous to them.
-- Ronald Dworkin		 
O liberty, Parent of happiness, celestial born When the first man became a living soul; His sacred genius thou.
-- Sir Edward Dyer		 
I am appalled at the extensive evidence indicating that there is today in the UN among the American employees there, the greatest concentration of communists that this Committee has ever encountered. … These people occupy high positions. They have very high salaries and almost all of these people have, in the past, been employees in the U.S. government in high and sensitive positions.
-- James O. Eastland		 
The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force.
-- Max Eastman		 
At Waco, was there really an urgency to get those people out of the compound at that particular time? Was the press going to make it look heroic for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms? At Ruby Ridge, there was one guy in a cabin at the top of the mountain. Was it necessary for federal agents to go up there and shoot a 14-year-old in the back and shoot a woman with a child in her arms? What kind of mentality does that?
-- Clint Eastwood		 
Abuse of power isn't limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we’re not vigilant.
-- Clint Eastwood		 
A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement.
-- Abba Eban		 
History teaches us that men and nations only behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
-- Abba Eban		 
Let us remind ourselves that in the Soviet Union the road to medical-care hell was paved with the same good intentions. ... At the end of the 20th century, Russia was infamous for having one of the worst health-care systems in the world.
-- Anna Ebeling		 
Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny.
-- Richard M. Ebeling		 
In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process -- learning the same "official history," the same "civic virtues," the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the independent soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political authorities wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was worship of the nation -- state and obedience to the Duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite. We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the "robber barons" of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn of the century; that wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman.
-- Richard M. Ebeling		 
Government is, and always has been, the greatest criminal threat to the peaceful members of society.
-- Richard M. Ebeling		 
Who is the fascist? Individualism and the political philosophy of limited government is not only inconsistent with but is the exact opposite of fascism and Nazism. Under fascism and Nazism, the state reigns supreme with absolute power over everyone and all forms of property. It can well be asked: who is the fascist, when the president of the United States and many Democrats and Republicans in congress call for expanded authority for the FBI and other federal security agencies to intrude into the lives of the American citizenry? Who is the fascist, when the call is made for increased power for the FBI to undertake “roving wiretapping” or have easier access to the telephone and credit-card records of the general population? Who is the fascist, when the proposal is made to make it easier for the FBI to investigate and infiltrate any political organization or association because the government views it as a potential terrorist danger?
-- Richard M. Ebeling		 
That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money.
-- Marriner Stoddard Eccles		 
This article will probably be photocopied and passed around the offices of exactly the same organizations that queue up to denounce copyright theft.
-- The Economist		 
For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.
-- Sir Arthur Eddington		 
It is, of course, true that if we continue to lose our freedoms, concentration camps on U.S. soil would eventually become a reality.
-- Thomas R. Eddlem		 
One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole. We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy.
-- Ottmar Edenhofer		 
If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
Restless is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project (Muscle Shoals Dam) nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
There is no expedient to which the average person will not go to avoid the hard work of thinking.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 


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