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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not completed to the point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it and it works.
-- William Faulkner		 
We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
-- William Faulkner		 
What is a left-wing socialist but a Marxist without a gun?
-- Don Feder		 
The actual process of money creation takes place in commercial banks. As noted earlier, demand liabilities of commercial banks are money.
-- Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago		 
Because of 'fractional' reserve system, banks, as a whole, can expand our money supply several times, by making loans and investments.
-- Federal Reserve Bank of New York		 
Commercial banks create checkbook money whenever they grant a loan, simply by adding new deposit dollars in accounts on their books in exchange for a borrower's IOU.
-- Federal Reserve Bank of New York		 
Without the confidence factor, many believe a paper money system is liable to collapse eventually.
-- Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia		 
The decrease in purchasing power incurred by holders of money due to inflation imparts gains to the issuers of money...
-- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis		 
'Racism’ has been redefined to mean anyone opposing big government dependency welfare programs.
-- Bill Federer		 
Man is deeply vulnerable when faced with overwhelming evil. Instead of consolidating his energy to fight it, he wastes valuable time and effort puzzling over it, insisting it is not, cannot possibly be, what it seems.
-- Konnilyn G. Feig		 
Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe.
-- Dianne Feinstein		 
I know the sense of helplessness that people feel. I know the urge to arm yourself because that's what I did. I was trained in firearms. I walked to the hospital when my husband was sick. I carried a concealed weapon and I made the determination if somebody was going to try and take me out, I was going to take them with me.
-- Dianne Feinstein		 
Censorship is advertising paid by the government.
-- Federico Fellini		 
To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
-- Felson		 
Legislators like pork because it helps them get reelected. They are interested in administrative details because long tenure promotes narrow specialization. The constituent service racket allows lawmakers to ignore big problems by fixing small ones. In becoming ombudsman -- glorified errand boys, -- incumbents build up enough good will for most to survive even a watershed year like 1992. By ending congressional careerism, term limits will encourage attention to larger legislative issues. By changing the understanding of the legislator's role, term limits are probably the most effective single reform that can be imposed on Congress. And imposed it will have to be: While great majorities of the American people support term limits, lawmakers oppose them in even larger proportions. With a career Congress, voters face a dilemma: They do not like paying taxes to Washington and hoping to get them back in the form of pork and entitlements, but as long as the system is rigged, it makes sense to vote for the incumbent to maximize your own take. Congressmen face a similar dilemma: Take the easy road to reelection or face the often difficult choices of balancing local and national interests. Take away the career mindset and both representatives and voters can make choices based on the merits of each case. ... In fact, one of the biggest benefits of non-professional legislators is that they would be unlikely to join with the bureaucrats and special interests in blowing smoke at the voters.
-- Eric Felton		 
Censorship is a dangerous tool that is primarily used to suppress from those who would challenge oppression by the society and that state, and particularly victimizes minorities. [It] can never eliminate evil ideas, and so the best answer to bad speech is more speech.
-- Feminists Against Censorship		 
We are not liberated until we liberate others. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves.
-- Marilyn Ferguson		 
Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.
-- Marilyn Ferguson		 
While outlining a not-yet-titled book about the emerging social alternatives, I thought again about the peculiar form of this movement; its atypical leadership, the patient intensity of its adherents, their unlikely successes. It suddenly struck me that in their sharing of strategies, their linkage, and their recognition of each other by subtle signals, the participants were not merely cooperating with one another. They were in collusion. It -- this movement -- is a conspiracy! … There are legions of conspirators. They are in corporations, universities, and hospitals, on the faculties of public schools, in factories and doctors’ offices, in state and federal agencies, on city councils, and the White House staff, in state legislatures, in volunteer organizations, in virtually all arenas of policy making in the country.
-- Marilyn Ferguson		 
Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine.
-- Victor Ferkiss		 
Governments have ever been known to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more.
-- Francisco Ferrer		 
We also need to encourage Americans to become more fiscally responsible themselves. We can do this by redesigning our tax system into an expenditure tax with a single flat rate. ... We have to substantially reduce the size and scope of the federal government, fundamentally increase the role of the states in choosing their own practices, and bring decision-making closer to the people, not to unelected administrators. These steps are crucial to getting our nation on a path of fiscal, political and constitutional responsibility.
-- Edwin Feulner		 
The best way to put more money in people's wallets is to leave it there in the first place.
-- Edwin Feulner		 
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-- Richard Feynman		 
There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
-- Richard Feynman		 
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
-- Richard Feynman		 
Most people know more about their congressmen via smear campaigns than they know about their own neighbor via conversations, and a lot of people know more about Britney Spears via tabloids than they know about their own congressmen via voting booklets. Does anyone else see the problem here?
-- Brock Fiant		 
Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.
-- Johann Gottlieb Fichte		 
You thus have no rights at all over our freedom of thought, you princes; no jurisdiction over that which is true or false; no right to determine the objects of our inquiry or to set limits to it; no right to hinder us from communicating the results, whether they be true or false, to whomever or however we wish.
-- Johann Gottlieb Fichte		 
Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices.  This is corruption in reality, give it whatever other name you please.
-- David Dudley Field, II		 
Freedom of the press and also of speech, assembly, and worship can persist as social forms and legal guarantees, while at the same time their functional realities can be gradually slipping away.
-- Marshall Field		 
If a blending of individualism and of cooperative participation is a prerequisite to a democratic solution of the problems of a society of free men, it must also be noted that an atmosphere of freedom is required if these problems are to be met constructively and as they arise.
-- Marshall Field		 
Here I close my opinion. I could not say less in view of questions of such gravity that go down to the very foundations of the government. If the provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an Act of Congress, where is the course of usurpation to end? The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness.
-- Justice Stephen J. Field		 
When I'm not thanked at all, I'm thanked enough; I've done my duty, and I've done no more.
-- Henry Fielding		 
There is no zeal blinder than that which is inspired with a love of justice against offenders.
-- Henry Fielding		 
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
-- W. C. Fields		 
Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our revolution. They existed before.
-- Millard Fillmore		 
Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all.
-- Financial Times		 
A criminal trial is not a search for truth. It is much too circumscribed for that. Rather, a trial is a formalized contest for the hearts and minds of a panel of twelve. It is a quest for a verdict in which information is selected and screened (we can almost say “processed”) before it is allowed to reach jurors.
-- Phillip Finch		 
...the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things.
-- Howard Fineman		 
I tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying.
-- Charles C. Finn		 
The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.
-- Ronald Firbank		 
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
-- First Amendment in the Bill of Rights		 
A man may be born a jackass; but it is his business if he makes himself a double one.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no time is left in which to produce. More time is spent in carrying out garbage than in carrying in food.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes — so check your value to the community.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
Social reform aims to improve the condition of the poor by worsening the condition of the rich.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.
-- Stanley Fish		 
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
-- Geoffrey Fisher		 
I believe [that William Graham Sumner] was one of the greatest professors we ever had at Yale, but I have drawn far away from his point of view, that of the old laissez faire doctrine. I remember he said in his classroom: 'Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist.' That amused his class very much, for he was as far from a revolutionary as you could expect. But I would like to say that if that time comes when there are two great parties, Anarchists and Socialists, then I am a Socialist.
-- Irving Fisher		 
Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess.
-- Irving Fisher		 
The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.
-- John A. Fisher		 
The persecuting spirit has its origin morally in the disposition of man to domineer over his fellow creatures; intellectually, in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.
-- John Fiske		 
The idea of neutrality in the speech context not only requires that the state refrain from choosing among viewpoints, but also that it not structure public debate in such a way as to favor one viewpoint over another. The state must act as a high-minded parliamentarian, making certain that all viewpoints are fully and fairly heard.
-- Owen Fiss		 
Either you think – or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald		 
The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as, from 1933 onward, “political criminality” was given a much broader definition than ever before and most forms of dissent and criticism were gradually criminalized. The result was that more “laws” or lawlike measures were put on the books than ever.
-- Shelia Fitzpatrick		 
Socialism is the idea that violent force is an appropriate response to peaceful, voluntary exchange.
-- Frank J. Fleming		 
Let me write the songs of a nation - I don't care who writes its laws.
-- Andrew Fletcher		 
And I cannot see, why arms should be denied to any man who is not a slave, since they are the only true badges of liberty.
-- Andrew Fletcher		 
Censorship in any form, represents a lack of trust in the judgment of the individual. The passage of time provides the best perspective for sorting the wheat from the chaff.
-- Bruce E. Fleury		 
We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.
-- Abraham Flexner		 
There are some weapons that are just so dangerous that society has a right and the obligation even to take those weapons out of circulation.
-- Jim Florio		 
Fate is an open road, and all you can do is put your foot on the gas and Drive, Baby Drive.
-- Padraig Flynn		 
If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me.
-- Larry Flynt		 
The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.
-- B. C. Forbes		 
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
-- Malcolm S. Forbes		 
The Declaration of Independence, the words that launched our nation -- 1,300 words. The Bible, the word of God -- 773,000 words. The Tax Code, the words of politicians -- 7,000,000 words -- and growing!
-- Steve Forbes		 
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
-- Henry Ford		 
To do for the world more than the world does for you -- that is success.
-- Henry Ford		 
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
-- E. M. Forster		 
Two cheers for democracy; one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
-- E. M. Forster		 
Procedure is the bone structure of a democratic society. Our scheme of law affords great latitude for dissent and opposition. It compels wide tolerance not only for their expression but also for the organization of people and forces to bring about the acceptance of the dissenter’s claim….We have alternatives to violence.
-- Abe Fortas		 
Government…may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another… The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality…
-- Abe Fortas		 
Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent. And they must give it the respect and the latitude which they claim for themselves.
-- Abe Fortas		 
I should, indeed, prefer twenty men to escape death through mercy, than one innocent to be condemned unjustly.
-- Sir John Fortescue		 
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
-- Harry Emerson Fosdick		 
Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.
-- Alan Dean Foster		 
Bankers have no right to establish a customary law among themselves, at the expence of other men.
-- Sir Michael Foster		 
No human government has a right to enquire into private opinions, to presume that it knows them, or to act on that presumption. Men are the best judges of the consequences of their own opinions, and how far they are likely to influence their actions; and it is most unnatural and tyrannical to say, “as you think, so must you act. I will collect the evidence of your future conduct from what I know to be your opinions.”
-- Charles James Fox		 
Opinions become dangerous to a state only when persecution makes it necessary for the people to communicate their ideas under the bond of secrecy.
-- Charles James Fox		 
Every attempt to gag the free expression of thought is an unsocial act against society. That is why judges and juries who try to enforce such laws make themselves ridiculous.
-- Jay Fox		 
“For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
-- Janet Frame		 
If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
-- Anatole France		 
The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
-- Anatole France		 
The world wishes to be deceived.
-- Sebastian Franck		 
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
-- Anne Frank		 
To vest a few fallible men – prosecutors, judges, jurors – with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J. S. Mill has called the “Moral Police,” it is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products.
-- Jerome D. Frank		 
To vest a few fallible men -- prosecutors, judges, jurors -- with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J.S. Mill called the "moral police" is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries…
-- Jerome D. Frank		 
Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization.
-- Jerome D. Frank		 
Choice has always been a privilege of those who could afford to pay for it.
-- Ellen Frankfort		 
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
The requirement of “due process” is not a fairweather or timid assurance. It must be respected in periods of calm and in times of trouble; it protects aliens as well as citizens.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
Ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system – a system in which the state must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not on another occasion indulge its own will.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 


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