Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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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.		 
Freedom is the ferment of freedom. The moistened sponge drinks up water greedily; the dry one sheds it.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.		 
There never was an idea stated that woke men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.		 
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.		 
Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.		 
It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.
-- John Holt		 
Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.
-- John Holt		 
No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.
-- John Holt		 
Education -- compulsory schooling, compulsory learning -- is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can.
-- John Holt		 
What children need is not new and better curriculum but access to more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them.
-- John Holt		 
No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors.
-- John Holt		 
People who make careers out of helping others -- sometimes at great sacrifice, often not -- usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help.
-- John Holt		 
It is the duty of a citizen in a free country not to fit into society but to make society.
-- John Holt		 
I believe that we learn best when we, not others are deciding what we are going to learn, and when we are choosing the people, materials, and experiences from which we will be learning.
-- John Holt		 
The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.
-- John Holt		 
There can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth.
-- George Jacob Holyoake		 
The doctrine that man is infinitely tough and resourceful and not easily cheated of his freedom to sin.
-- George C. Homans		 
I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.
-- Homer		 
To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right, in peace and war, in council and in fight.
-- Homer		 
If one shoots at a king, one must not miss.
-- Sidney Hook		 
To silence criticism is to silence freedom.
-- Sidney Hook		 
One of the central assumptions of the concept of democracy, perhaps its most central assumption, is that by and large human beings are better judges of their own interests…. The operating maxim of the democratic ideology is, “Whoever wears the shoe knows best where it pinches.”
-- Sidney Hook		 
Honest difference of views and honest debate are not disunity. They are the vital process of policy among free men.
-- Herbert Hoover		 
It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice.
-- Herbert Hoover		 
Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he is free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family.
-- Herbert Hoover		 
Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.
-- Herbert Hoover		 
Truth telling, I have found, is the key to responsible citizenship. The thousands of criminals I have seen in 40 years of law enforcement have had one thing in common: every single one was a liar.
-- J. Edgar Hoover		 
Justice is incidental to law and order.
-- J. Edgar Hoover		 
The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.
-- J. Edgar Hoover		 
I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.
-- J. Edgar Hoover		 
The Communist threat from without must not blind us to the Communist threat from within. The latter is reaching into the very heart of America through its espionage agents and a cunning, defiant, and lawless communist party, which is fanatically dedicated to the Marxist cause of world enslavement and destruction of the foundations of our republic.
-- J. Edgar Hoover		 
There is no doubt that America is now the prime target of international communism.
-- J. Edgar Hoover		 
We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them. ... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.
-- J. Edgar Hoover		 
If the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds ... its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ french fries, lemonade and videos.
-- Hans-Hermann Hoppe		 
The state spends much time and effort persuading the public that it is not really what it is and that the consequences of its actions are positive rather than negative.
-- Hans Hermann Hoppe		 
Who then is free? The wise who can command his passions, who fears not want, nor death, nor chains, firmly resisting his appetites and despising the honors of the world, who relies wholly on himself, whose angular points of character have all been rounded off and polished.
-- Horace		 
Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.
-- Horace		 
Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.
-- Horace		 
And when all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy is Warre; which provideth for every man, by Victory, or Death.
-- Horace		 
Carpe Diem. (Seize the day.)
-- Horace		 
Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.
-- Horace		 
“Painters and poets,” you say, “have always had an equal license in bold invention.” We know; we claim the liberty for ourselves and in turn we give it to others.
-- Horace		 
In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process—learning the same “official history,” the same “civic virtues,” the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the individual soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political officials wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was the worship of the nation-state and obedience to the duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
Every day, IRS agents levy liens on homes, bank accounts, and businesses; they confiscate cars, furniture, boats, and other personal property without the constitutional protections of due notice, hearing, and due process. If a person forcibly resists, government agents kill him for “resisting arrest.”
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
Every single American can exclaim, 'Nothing justifies what they did in New York and Washington,' not even the bombs that our government has dropped on them for ten years or the embargo that has caused the deaths of so many children. That's of course true…The issue is simply an acceptance of reality and a fundamental fact of life: When governments do bad things to people, people sometimes retaliate.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
Another major reason why crime is increasing is that crime pays, and in our tax-ridden, regulation crushed economy, many people cannot economically survive through low-end jobs. ... 'The income that offenders can earn in the world of crime, as compared with the world of work, all too often makes crime appear to be the better choice.' In Washington, D.C., it costs $7,000 in city fees to open a pushcart. In California, up to eighty federal and state licenses are required to open a small business. In New York, a medallion to operate a taxicab costs $150,000. More than 700 occupations in the United States require a government license. Throughout the country, church soup kitchens are being closed by departments of health. No wonder so many people turn to crime and violence to survive.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
There is no difference in principle, ... between the economic philosophy of Nazism, socialism, communism, and fascism and that of the American welfare state and regulated economy.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the United States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it. Statists believe that their lives -- their very being -- are a privilege that the state has given to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- dependent on the consent of the government. Thus, statists support such devices as income taxation, licensing laws, regulations, passports, trade restrictions, and the like.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
[T]ake the war on drugs. The average American says, “The war on drugs has been beneficial.” The rest of us see reality. This war has destroyed thousands of Americans. It is also a pretext for government agents to rob innocent people in airports and on the highways -- they seize and confiscate large amounts of cash and say to their victims: “Sue us if you don’t like it.” And more and more judges, politicians, intelligence agents, and law-enforcement officers are on the take -- as dependent on the drug-war largess as the drug lords themselves.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
The core issue facing the American people is this: Have the guardians become the terrorists?
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
Of course, the proponents of political tyranny are usually well-motivated. Those who enacted the gun-registration law in California point to criminals who have used semiautomatic weapons to commit horrible, murderous acts. But the illusion -- the pipe dream -- is that bad acts can be prevented by the deprivation of liberty. They cannot be! Life is always insecure. The only choice is between liberty and insecurity, on the one hand, and insecurity and enslavement on the other. The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government. This is why the gun owners of California might ultimately go down in history as among the greatest and most courageous patriots of our time.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the "robber barons" of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn of the century; that Wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned -- the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach -- is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. ... [T]he long-term solution is to dismantle, not reform, the iron fist of the welfare state and the controlled economy. This includes the end (not the reform) of the IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the SEC, the FDA, HUD, the departments of HHS, Labor, Agriculture, and energy, and every other agency that takes money from some and gives it to others or interferes with peaceful behavior.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
Contrary to everything our rulers tell us, and everything that our schoolteachers are teaching the children of this nation, the biggest threat to the lives and well-being of the American people lies not with some foreign government. The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. And while gun ownership stands as a barrier to potential, Nazi-like behavior, the long-term solution is to dismantle, not reform, the iron fist of the welfare state and the controlled economy. This includes the end (not the reform) of the IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the SEC, the FDA, HUD, the departments of HHS, Labor, Agriculture, and Energy, and every other agency that takes money from some and gives it to others or interferes with peaceful behavior. It entails the repeal of all laws that permit such conduct. And it means the privatization of most of the bureaucrats who work for the U.S. government.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people’s lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger		 
In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.
-- Jack Horner		 
We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression.
-- Karen Horney		 
In Washington, of course, evading responsibility is an art form, so it is not always easy to tell who's responsible for which mess.
-- David Horowitz		 
The building that housed Germany's leading industrial organization prior to World War II, and for all practical purposes the Third Reich during the war, became CIA European headquarters immediately following the war. The marble decorated I.G. Farben building was intentionally spared from allied bombing runs. It was largely built by the 'Bayer Pharmaceutical' consortium that included the distributors of aspirin and heroin to U.S. markets by the 'Farbenfabriken of Elberfeld Co., 40 Stone Street, New York' according to a 1906 Medical Observer advertisement.
-- Dr. Leonard Horowitz		 


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