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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.
-- A. A. Hodge		 
Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master.
-- Thomas Hodgskin		 
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
-- Ralph Hodgson		 
What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.
-- Friedrich Hoelderlin		 
Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ...as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities?
-- Sergei Hoff		 
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
-- Jimmy Hoffa		 
Don't let any man into your cab, your home, or your heart, unless he's a friend of labor.
-- Jimmy Hoffa		 
I doubt if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
One realizes that one of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats -- we know it not.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
You can never get enough of what you don't really need.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
It is maintained that a society is free only when dissenting minorities have room to throw their weight around. As a matter of fact, a dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
We clamour for equality chiefly in areas where we cannot ourselves hope to obtain excellence.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
There can be no freedom without freedom to fail.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning- from minding other people's business- and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power. The indications are that such an impairment is brought about not by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but by distributing and diversifying power and pitting one category or unit of power against the other. Where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our lives.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.
-- Eric Hoffer		 
Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.
-- Abbie Hoffman		 
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
-- Abbie Hoffman		 
I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new conciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman		 
I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman		 
Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preperations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman		 
The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience, makes it posible with their help, and after suitable internal and external perparation... to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak... I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman		 
Adolf Hitler's life style is simple. He never drinks alcohol and does not smoke.
-- Heinrich Hoffmann		 
A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.
-- Richard Hofstadter		 
There is no such thing as a majority right. Only those who understand and act according to this principle can promote true freedom.
-- Harry H. Hoiles		 
To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils.
-- Thomas Holcroft		 
Taking into account all levels of government, the net tax rate of those born in 1920 is 29% over their lifetimes, rising gradually to 34% for those born in 1980. For the generation born in 1994, it is 84%, and reduced only to 72% by the "extreme" Republican budget proposals. Is it fair for our future citizens to keep only 16% or 28% of their earned income?
-- Fred Holden		 
The WTO is dejure [legally] world government.
-- William Holder		 
[U]nder the United States Constitution, effective population-control programs, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
-- John Holdren		 
You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
-- Billie Holiday		 
I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
-- Billie Holiday		 
I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.
-- Billie Holiday		 
Perfect love holds the secret of the world's perfect liberty.
-- Josiah Gilbert Holland		 
The cry of the soul is for freedom. It longs for liberty, from the date of its first conscious moments.
-- Josiah Gilbert Holland		 
Another perceived attribute of intellectuals that needs rethinking and revision: the assumption that they are deeply and unequivocally committed to personal, political and intellectual freedom and especially free expression…many Western intellectuals’ commitment to intellectual freedom is selective at best.
-- Paul Hollander		 
[T]he greatest problem facing the United States today is not racism; it is the disappearance of the can-do attitude that built the country, ... We’ve lost the sense of individual responsibility for our problems, and that’s bad enough. But what’s worse, we’re losing faith in our ability to solve our problems. This acquired sense of helplessness is catastrophic, and it has paralyzed large swaths of the American public – rural, urban and suburban. … Encouraging dependence upon government not only creates generations of helpless people; it inures them to government’s ineffectiveness.
-- Laura Hollis		 
The president of the American Bar Association begins a nationwide tour, giving speeches on the dangers of Treaty Law: 'The doctrine that the treaty power is unlimited and omnipotent and may be used to OVERRIDE the Constitution and the Bill of Rights...is a doctrine of recent origin and largely derived from Missouri v. Holland.'
-- Frank E. Holman		 
Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself -- at the expense of the new demands of each new generation.
-- John Haynes Holmes		 
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase “due process of law” there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country... Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, 'Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech.'
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 


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