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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces, as first general and admiral ... while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies -- all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
In the general course of human nature, A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others. ... The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
In the general course of human nature, A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
In the recommendation to admit indiscriminately foreign emigrants of every description to the privileges of American citizens on their first entrance into our country, there is an attempt to break down every pale which has been erected for the preservation of a national spirit and a national character; and to let in the most powerful means of perverting and corrupting both the one and the other.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
[T]here is a wide difference between closing the door altogether and throwing it entirely open; between a postponement of fourteen years and an immediate admission to all the rights of citizenship. Some reasonable term ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of at least a probability of their feeling a real interest in our affairs.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice, and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of its political cares.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
The greatest danger is that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to society itself.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
A nation, which can prefer appeasement over danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.
-- Alexander Hamilton		 
Jurors should acquit, even against the judge’s instruction ... if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction that the charge of the court is wrong.
-- Andrew Hamilton		 
I know, may it please your honour, the jury may do so; but I do likewise know they may do otherwise. I know they have the right, beyond all dispute, to determine both the law and the fact; and where they do not doubt the law, they ought to do so. This of leaving it to the judgment of the Court whether the words are libelous or not in effect renders juries useless (to say no worse) in many cases.
-- Andrew Hamilton		 
I have always believed that government had a limited capacity to do good and a virtually infinite capacity to do harm...
-- Neil Hamilton		 
Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician. Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there. Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16. A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death. A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you. Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water. And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.
-- Suheir Hammad		 
It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.
-- Dag Hammarskjold		 
Americans will spend more this year per capita on taxes than on food ($2,693), clothing ($1,404) and shelter ($5,833) combined. The single highest spending item is federal taxes, at $7,026 ... Arizonans’ per-capita bite is $9,041, a combination of federal and state taxes.
-- Sara Hammond		 
There, I guess King George will be able to read that.
-- John Hancock		 
In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
I believe that the community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence, where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won.
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it.
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no court, can even do much to help it.
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women...
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of the law. Detestation of existing politics is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution...
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
Words are chameleons, which reflect the colour of their environment.
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it… What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few -- as we have learned to our sorrow. What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias...
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.
-- Judge Learned Hand		 
The thought that average citizens will somehow be better able to successfully defend themselves more effectively than our nation's trained professionals is absurd.
-- Handgun Control, Inc.		 
There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts.
-- Charles Handy		 
We will either find a way or make one.
-- Hannibal		 
The IRS is an extraordinary example of the end justifying the means. The means of this agency is growth. It is interesting that the revenue officers within the IRS refer to taxpayers as 'inventory'. The IRS embodies the political realities of the selfish human desire to dominate others. Thus the end of this gigantic pretense of officialdom is power, pure and simple. The meek may inherit the earth, but they will never receive a promotion in an agency where efficiency is measured by the number of seizures of taxpayers' property and by the number of citizens and businesses driven into bankruptcy.
-- George Hansen		 
Only the IRS can attach 100% of a tax debtor's wages and/or property.
Only the IRS can invade the privacy of a citizen without court process of any kind.
Only the IRS can seize property without a court order.
Only the IRS can force a citizen to try his case in a special court governed by the IRS.
Only the IRS can compel the production of documents, records, and other materials without a court case being in existence.
Only the IRS can with impunity publish the details of a citizens debt.
Only the IRS can legally, without a court order, subject citizens to electronic surveillance.
Only the IRS can force waiver of statute of limitations and other citizen's rights through the threat of Arbitrary assesment.
Only the IRS uses extralegal coercion. Threats to witnesses to examine their taxes regularly produces whatever evidence the IRS dictates.
Only the IRS is free to violate a written agreement with a citizen.
Only the IRS uses reprisals against citizen and public officials alike.
Only the IRS can take property on the basis of conjecture.
Only the IRS is free to maintain lists of citizen guilty of no crime for the purpose of harassing and monitoring them.
Only the IRS envelops all citizens.
Only the IRS publicly admits that it's purpose is to instill fear in the citizenry as a technique of performing it's function.
-- George V. Hansen		 
One method of overcoming the difficult informational requirements of the allocation models described above is by enacting a requirement that anyone wanting to purchase cigarettes must first purchase a 'cigarette card'. The card, which could be based on the same magnetic strip (or computer chip) technology used for credit cards and ATM cards, would be issued to any legal-aged smoker who wanted to buy cigarettes and would have to be presented by the smoker each time she purchased cigarettes. A reaction of many readers may well be that our proposal gives too much information to government agencies, therefore creating a 'Big Brother' problem. We sympathize with that concern, but we believe the problem is not as significant as it may appear initially. First, it is not clear that the sort of information that the cigarette card system would generate is any different from the sort of information that the American public routinely provides to government and private agencies. In other words, it may be too late to worry about the sort of privacy concern that this proposal raises.
-- Jon D. Hanson and Kyle D. Logue		 
Imagine the traditionalist as living in synopticon—a suspect that is the target of 24/7 viewing, indoctrination, and conditioning by progressive auditors. In other words, a 40-45 percent minority of Americans is relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360- degree ring of prying institutional overseers. There is no escape. There is no respite. There is no quarter given.
-- Victor Davis Hanson		 
The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites.'
-- Larry Hardiman		 
Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison.
-- John Hardwick		 
There is no prospect that today's younger workers will receive all the Social Security and Medicare benefits currently promised them.
-- Dorcas Hardy		 
Persons with weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits.
-- Thomas Hardy		 
Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.
-- Sir John Harington		 
The constitutional right of free expression... is designed and intended to remove governmental restraints from the arena of public discussion, putting the decision as to what views shall be voiced in the hands of each of us, in the hope that the use of such freedom will ultimately produce a more capable citizenry and more perfect polity and in the belief that no other approach would comport with the premise of individual dignity and choice upon which our political systems rests.
-- John Marshall Harlan II		 
One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric.
-- John Marshall Harlan II		 
Privacy in one’s associations… may in many circumstances be indispensable to freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.
-- John Marshall Harlan II		 
In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
-- John Marshall Harlan		 
I cannot assent to the view, if it be meant that the legislature may impair or abridge the rights of a free press and of free speech whenever it thinks that the public welfare requires that it be done. The public welfare cannot override constitutional privilege.
-- John Marshall Harlan		 
We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which, practically speaking, may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.
-- John Marshall Harlan II		 
The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.
-- Lucille S. Harper		 
The most powerful clique in these (CFR) groups have one objective in common they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace. What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for “the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all powerful one world government.”
-- Harpers magazine		 
Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.
-- Sir John Harrington		 
Some [IRS agents] were vicious -- they’d brag back at the office, 'Boy did I make that guy jump.' Or 'I had that woman crying when I told her I’d put her on the street with her kids.' One agent who bragged about padlocking some guy’s business said the man was so upset he asked, 'How do you expect me to pay now?' The agent said, 'I told him, Go get your wife to peddle [herself].'
-- Art Harris		 
It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man.
-- David Harris		 
[The prison guards are] capable of committing daily atrocities and obscenities, smiling the smile of the angels all the while.
-- Jean Harris		 
Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
-- Sydney J. Harris		 
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
-- Sydney J. Harris		 
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice -- that is, until we have stopped saying, "It got lost," and say, "I lost it.
-- Sydney J. Harris		 
Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.
-- William T. Harris		 
We Americans have no commission from God to police the world
-- Benjamin Harrison		 
Those who are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize.
-- Elizabeth Harrison		 
The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators.
-- William Henry Harrison		 
Understanding of men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon their passions and prejudices.
-- William Henry Harrison		 
The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart		 
...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart		 
In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart		 
Vitality springs from diversity -- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces-alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart		 
Every culture and every religion of what we call the civilized world carries, in one form or another, a mythos or story about a time in the past or future when humans lived or will live in peace and harmony. Whether it's referred to as Valhalla or Eden, Shambala or 'A Thousand Years of Peace,' the Satya Yuga or Jannat, stories of past or coming times of paradise go hand-in-hand with hierarchical cultures. Such prophecies were clearly in the minds of America's Founders when they first discussed integrating Greek ideas of democracy, Roman notions of a republic, Masonic utopian ideals, and the Iroquois Federation's constitutionally organized egalitarian society, which was known to Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Franklin. The creation of the United States of America brought into the world a dramatic new experiment in how people could live together in a modern state.
-- Thom Hartmann		 
As the death toll mounts -- as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on -- the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.
-- Harvard University Press		 
They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?
-- Paul Harvey		 
One would think by listening to all the propaganda about the United Nations that they are some sort of benevolent, peaceful organization. Never in the history of the United Nations has it stood for anything but killing and violence. They have never kept peace anywhere on this globe. Their sole function is to replace the U.S. military - dissolve all four branches of our armed forces. Their allegiance is only to the United Nations Charter which does not recognize the U.S. Constitution. This body is made up almost exclusively of communists and leaders of the bloodiest regimes on this globe. Their history and operating agenda is apparent to anyone who takes the time to sincerely and with an open mind, research the facts of this organization, separating truth from myth. Bilderberger participants ( another group committed to one-world domination) in 1992 called for 'conditioning the public to accept the idea of a U.N. army that could, by force, impose its will on the internal affairs of any nation.'
-- Paul Harvey		 
It was self-serving politicians who convinced recent generations of Americans that we could all stand in a circle with our hands in each other’s pockets and somehow get rich.
-- Paul Harvey		 


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