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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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The people in the MSM (mainstream media) don't think of themselves as liberal.  They're just in favor of collectivism and against individualism in general -- without using many labels (or much thought) of any kind.  They go out of their way only to mention a minority group if they can.  Groupism is what they believe in.
-- Rick Gaber		 
The United States was supposed to have a limited government because the founders knew government power attracts demagogues and despots as surely as horse manure attracts horseflies.
-- Rick Gaber		 
Many academicians and self-styled intellectuals, with a habitually arrogant and condescending attitude, treat the rest of the world with contempt. These so-called 'intelligentsia' congratulate themselves for, not only having high IQs and lots of education in their particular fields, but for having achieved the allegedly momentous insight that free-market capitalism and pure altruism are ultimately incompatible (duh). Yet they're still too damned stupid to realize, and too damned ignorant to acknowledge, that altruism is NOT the only moral code available to mankind. (It is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all). This stunted thinking has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion.
-- Rick Gaber		 
Enron, of course, is exactly the kind of corporation which could not exist in pure capitalism. As a creature, in effect, of politicians, it was deliberately converted from a small pipeline company into an international conglomerate by conniving scoundrels who designed it from the beginning to use the power of their politician-friends to give it government contracts, subsidies, monopoly powers, and favorable regulations to force prospective customers to do business with them, essentially at gunpoint. Obviously, this is fascism, not capitalism, and what you get more and more of when you work to transform what was once the rule of clear-cut law into the rule of men (especially agenda-driving, nuance-inventing judges and lawyers).
-- Rick Gaber		 
Always remember the difference between economic power and political power: You can refuse to hire someone's services or buy his products in the private sector and go somewhere else instead. In the public sector, though, if you refuse to accept a politician's or bureaucrat's product or services you go to jail. Ultimately, after all, all regulations are observed and all taxes are paid at gunpoint. I believe those few who can't even see that have been short-sighted sheep, and I suggest they learn how to think conceptually, develop consistency and grasp principles soon.
-- Rick Gaber		 
Most of us here were, at one time or another, active in either the O.S.S., the State Department, or the European Economic Administration. During those times, and without exception, we operated under directives issued by the White House, the substance of which was to the effect that we should make every effort to so alter life in the United States as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union. We are continuing to be guided by just such directives.
-- H. Rowan Gaither		 
We operate here under directives which emanate from the White House... The substance of the directives under which we operate is that we shall use our grant making power to alter life in the United States such that we can comfortably be merged with the Soviet Union.
-- Rowan Gaither		 
[The task is to] covertly lower the standard of living, the whole social structure, of America so that we can be merged with all other nations.
-- Rowan Gaither		 
19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society.
-- Rocco Galati		 
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
Under the privilege of the First Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. It's a remarkably shrewd and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
The Federal Reserve System is treated by nearly all economists with reverence. On no matter is their instruction of the young in the subtlety and benignity of established institutions more admiring-or, in broad effect, more successful. Corporations are flawed by an instinct for monopoly. Trade unions interfere with the market, urge trade restrictions, resist new technology and thus obstruct progress, and they can fall victim to extortionists and racketeers. The regulatory agencies of the government are notably imperfect instruments of economic guidance. The Federal Reserve System is not totally above criticism. It makes many mistakes but these are always interesting errors of judgment. they are examined not critically but respectfully to discover why men of insight went wrong. That for such error anyone should be sacked or even seriously rebuked is, for economists, nearly unthinkable. This approval goes back to the origins and can be highly negligent of circumstance. The most widely read account of the genesis of the System tells glowingly of its birth in the closing weeks of 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Wilson.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith		 
Integrity is what we do, what we say, and what we say we do.
-- Don Galer		 
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
-- Galileo Galilei		 
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.
-- Galileo Galilei		 
In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
-- Galileo Galilei		 
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and  intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-- Galileo Galilei		 
I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't work.
-- Gallagher		 
The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.
-- Albert Gallatin		 
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.
-- Indira Gandhi		 
You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.
-- Indira Gandhi		 
Freedom is not worth living if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that previous right.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
The seven blunders that human society commits and cause all the violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principles.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
From my experience of hundreds of children, I know that they have perhaps a finer sense of honour than you or I have. The greatest lessons in life, if we would but stoop and humble ourselves, we would learn not from grown-up learned men, but from the so-called ignorant children.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Non-violent resistance implies the very opposite of weakness. Defiance combined with non-retaliatory acceptance of repression from one's opponents is active, not passive. It requires strength, and there is nothing automatic or intuitive about the resoluteness required for using non-violent methods in political struggle and the quest for Truth.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Good government is the most dangerous government, because it deprives people of the need to look after themselves.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 

-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Men ... should do their actual living and working in communities ... small enough to permit of genuine self-government and the assumption of personal responsibilities, federated into larger units in such a way that the temptation to abuse great power should not arise. The larger (structurally) a democracy grows, the less becomes the rule of the people and the smaller is the say of individuals and localised groups in dealing with their own destinies. Moreover, love and affection, are essentially personal relationships. Consequently, it is only in small groups that Charity, in the Pauline sense of the word, can manifest itself. Needless to say, the smallness of the group, in no way guarantees the emergence of Charity. In a large undifferentiated group, the possibility does not even exist, for the simple reason that most of its members cannot, in the nature of things, have personal relations with one another.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
If we are to reach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. ... Freedom and slavery are mental states. Therefore, the first thing to say to yourself: 'I shall no longer accept the role of a slave. I shall not obey orders as such but shall disobey them when they are in conflict with my conscience'.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Live life simply so that others may simply live.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Truth never damages a cause that is just.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
I think it would be an excellent idea.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Honest differences are a healthy sign of progress.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Once one assumes an attitude of intolerance, there is no knowing where it will take one. Intolerance, someone has said, is violence to the intellect and hatred is violence to the heart.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Nonviolence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our very being.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
Courtesy towards opponents and eagerness to understand their view-point is the ABC of non-violence.
-- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi		 
The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.
-- Helen H. Gardner		 
It's difficult to view the world outside our human context. Staying alive and paying the bills both require our attention squarely fixed on our own business. Our sprawling cities and suburbs are wonderful and frightening tributes to creative self-absorption. In them, we spend our microscheduled days bustling between work and the endless details of our private lives, turning in our moments of rest to the buzzing distractions of television and computers - all accelerating toward some ultimate, unseen fulfillment of convenience and hyperreality. Little encourages us to pause and look around, much less question the end goal of all our busyness. Anything slower than the quick cuts of TV commercials is overwhelmed by our impatience and short attention. Unfortunately, we might be missing something important - to our happiness and to our survival.
-- Jason Gardner		 
Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.
-- John W. Gardner		 
In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down...An end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old fashioned assault...
-- Richard N. Gardner		 
The chief duty of the National Government in connection with the currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value. Grave doubts have been entertained whether Congress is authorized by the Constitution to make any form of paper money legal tender. The present issue of United States notes has been sustained by the necessities of war; but such paper should depend for its value and currency upon its convenience in use and its prompt redemption in coin at the will of the holder, and not upon its compulsory circulation. These notes are not money, but promises to pay money. If the holders demand it, the promise should be kept.
-- James A. Garfield		 
The prosperity which now prevails is without parallel in our history. Fruitful seasons have done much to secure it, but they have not done all. The preservation of the public credit and the resumption of specie payments, so successfully attained by the Administration of my predecessors, have enabled our people to secure the blessings which the seasons brought.
-- James A. Garfield		 
Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality.
-- James A. Garfield		 
Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let every one know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.
-- James A. Garfield		 
I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error.
-- James A. Garfield		 
The chief duty of the National Government in connection with the currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value. Grave doubts have been entertained whether Congress is authorized by the Constitution to make any form of paper money legal tender. The present issue of United States notes has been sustained by the necessities of war; but such paper should depend for its value and currency upon its convenience in use and its prompt redemption in coin at the will of the holder, and not upon its compulsory circulation. These notes are not money, but promises to pay money. If the holders demand it, the promise should be kept.
-- James A. Garfield		 
The refunding of the national debt at a lower rate of interest should be accomplished without compelling the withdrawal of the national-bank notes, and thus disturbing the business of the country.
-- James A. Garfield		 
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.
-- James A. Garfield		 
Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.
-- James A. Garfield		 
By the experience of commercial nations in all ages it has been found that gold and silver afford the only safe foundation for a monetary system. Confusion has recently been created by variations in the relative value of the two metals, but I confidently believe that arrangements can be made between the leading commercial nations which will secure the general use of both metals. Congress should provide that the compulsory coinage of silver now required by law may not disturb our monetary system by driving either metal out of circulation. If possible, such an adjustment should be made that the purchasing power of every coined dollar will be exactly equal to its debt-paying power in all the markets of the world.
-- James A. Garfield		 
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it.
-- Stanley Garn		 
[W]hat suffers in the atmosphere of immediacy is analysis. What suffers in this search for speed is depth. The media in the wealthy world are becoming increasingly simplistic, superficial, and celebrity-focused.
-- Laurie Garrett		 
Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?
-- William Lloyd Garrison		 
Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril.
-- William Lloyd Garrison		 
Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?
-- William Lloyd Garrison		 
No man shall rule over me with my consent. I will rule over no man.
-- William Lloyd Garrison		 
Little boldness is needed to assail the opinions and practices of notoriously wicked men; but to rebuke great and good men for their conduct, and to impeach their discernment, is the highest effort of moral courage.
-- William Lloyd Garrison		 
There is no reason for anyone in this country, anyone except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun. I used to think handguns could be controlled by laws about registration, by laws requiring waiting periods for purchasers, by laws making sellers check out the past of buyers. I now think the only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns. And the only way to do that is to change the Constitution.
-- Michael Gartner		 
Consider also the willy-nilly growth of the Social Security number. When the numbers were created in 1935, they were supposed to be used for one thing only, to record individual workers’ payments into the Social Security system. Eight years later, Franklin Roosevelt decided all new federal record-keeping would be based on the numbers. In 1962, the IRS adopted them as taxpayer identification numbers. And after Congress permitted states to use the numbers for welfare payments and driver’s licenses in 1976, they mushroomed: food stamps, school lunches, federal loans, even blood donations required Social Security numbers. These days it’s almost impossible to open a bank account or hook up your telephone without one.
-- Glenn Garvin		 
Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it.
-- Robbie Gass		 
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
-- Daryl Gates		 
The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn’t real.
-- John Taylor Gatto		 
School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course.
-- John Taylor Gatto		 
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents....
-- John Taylor Gatto		 
Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.
-- John Taylor Gatto		 
Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory.
-- John Taylor Gatto		 
If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.
-- Carl Friedrich Gauss		 
Describing an action or an event as the "consequence" of speech presupposes that there is some causal connection between them. A central issue in any debate about the limits of free speech is the nature and the imminence of the causal connection between speech and its alleged consequences…. In actual social situations it is impossible to isolate factors and determine their contribution to effects. Such control is extremely complicated even in a scientific laboratory.
-- Ruth Gavison		 
My dear sir, let me tell you that every citizen has full legal right to arrest anyone whom he sees committing any criminal offense, big or little. The law of England and of this country has been very careful to confer no more right in that respect upon policemen and constables than it confers on every citizen. You have the same right to make an arrest for an offense committed in your presence that any policeman has. But we cannot all be bothering with making arrests, so we employ a certain number of our fellow citizens for that purpose and put blue clothes and brass buttons on them. But their clothes and their buttons add nothing whatever to their right to make arrests without warrant. They still have only the same right which the law gives to all of us. Be so good as to look at section 183 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and be convinced of your powers, and then sail right in as hard and as fast as you want to, being careful, however, only to arrest guilty persons, for otherwise your victims will turn around and sue you for damages for false arrest. Policemen have to face the same risk.
-- William Jay Gaynor		 
The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States... Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America.
-- Gazette of the United States		 
Since the federal constitution has removed all danger of our having a paper tender, our trade is advanced fifty percent. Our monied people can trust their cash abroad, and have brought their coin into circulation.
-- The Pennsylvania Gazette		 
The most efficacious method of dealing with deviancy is to ignore, to the furthest point of our tolerance, those items which we find offensive.
-- Ilbert Geis		 


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