Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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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		 
That the CFR has been in control of the foreign policy of the United States for some time should now be beyond question.
-- Richard Harwood		 
A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends.
-- Caryl Parker Haskins		 
Our job [journalism] is to monitor the centres of power.
-- Amira Hass		 
The greatest Glory of a free-born People, Is to transmit that Freedom to their Children.
-- William Havard		 
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can probe mightier than ten military divisions.
-- Vaclav Havel		 
If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all.
-- Vaclav Havel		 
Lying can never save us from another lie.
-- Vaclav Havel		 
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one is true.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne		 
Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing.
-- Ralph M. Hawtrey		 
The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.
-- John Hay		 
This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.
-- Robert Earl Hayden		 
What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
[T]hose who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently.  Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
But after war [WW II] broke out I felt that this widespread misunderstanding of the political systems of our enemies, and soon also our new ally, Russia, constituted a serious danger which had to be met by a more systematic effort. Also, it was already fairly obvious that England herself was likely to experiment after the war with the same kind of policies which I was convinced had contributed so much to destroy liberty elsewhere. ... Opinion moves fast in the United States, and even now it is difficult to remember how comparatively short a time it was before The Road to Serfdom appeared that the most extreme kind of economic planning had been seriously advocated and the model of Russia held up for imitation by men who were soon to play an important role in public affairs. ... Be it enough to mention that in 1934 the newly established National Planning Board devoted a good deal of attention to the example of planning provided by these four countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 
Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek		 


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