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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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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.		 
Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker’s enthusiasm for the result.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
-- 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.		 
The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted with a view to the protection of the colored race, but has been found to be equally important in its application to the rights of all.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be — that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy -- I don't disparage envy but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
Once the mind has been stretched by a new idea, it will never again return to its original size.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi-sovereign that can be identified.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe…that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market… That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We felt, we still feel, the passion of life to it's top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from bondage of irrational fear.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
There's nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.		 
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.		 
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.		 


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