Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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Have no fear of robbers or murderers.  They are external dangers, petty dangers.  We should fear ourselves.  Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murders.  The great dangers are within us.  Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses?  Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.
-- Victor Hugo		 
Liberation is not deliverance.
-- Victor Hugo		 
[G]overnment theft of private money and redistribution by a government elite is communism not democracy. ... Communism has already been tried for over 70 years, and it doesn't work because people work to support themselves, not their neighbors. When the rewards are confiscated and redistributed to others, people produce less or stop producing altogether. The quantity of "goods in common" declines until the system finally collapses and everybody is hungry, not just "the poor." Then totalitarianism steps in to force people to produce (ask the Russians, the Poles, the Estonians).
-- Don Hull		 
Fiat-money systems tend to make people insatiable in their quest for ever higher monetary returns on their investments,
-- Jorg Guido Hulsmann		 
You can imagine, then, how this inflation and debt-based system, over time, will begin to change the culture of a society and its behavior. We become more materialistic than under a natural monetary system. We can’t just sit on our savings anymore, and we have to watch our investments constantly, and think about revenue constantly, because if it is not earning enough, we are actively getting poorer.
-- Jorg Guido Hulsmann		 
In a fiat money society you are more likely to increase your returns by remaining in debt and continuing to chase monetary revenue indefinitely by leveraging more and more funds.
-- Jorg Guido Hulsmann		 
It's OK to lie. It's OK to steal. It's OK to have premarital sex. It's OK to cheat or to kill if these things are part of your value system, and you clarified these values for yourself. The important thing is not what values you choose, but that you have chosen them for yourself and without coercion of parents, spouse, priest, friends, ministers or social pressure of any kind.
-- Humanist Curriculum		 
We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move towards the building of a world community...
-- Humanist Manifesto (Article 12)		 
We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds. We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move towards the building of a world community. We look toward the development of a system of world law, world order, based upon transnational government.
-- Humanist Manifesto, Article 12		 
Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few.
-- David Hume		 
Everything in the world is purchased by labor.
-- David Hume		 
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
-- David Hume		 
Southerners did not stop with an open defense of slavery. They went on to attack northern society for its 'wage slavery' and 'exploitation of workers,' using arguments repeated by socialist critics of capitalism. The southern writer who developed these arguments most extensively was George Fitzhugh, a Virginia planter and lawyer. His two books were provocatively entitled Sociology for the South: Or the Failure of the Free Society and Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters. In them, Fitzhugh defended slavery as a practical form of socialism that provided contented slaves with paternalistic masters, thereby eliminating harsh conflicts between employers and allegedly free workers. 'A Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism; it is a joint concern, in which the slave ... is far happier, because ... he is always sure of support.' ... 'The best governed countries, and which have prospered the most, have always been distinguished for the number and stringency of their laws,' he wrote; 'liberty is an evil which government is intended to correct.'
-- Jeffrey Rogers Hummel		 
Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, and one more safeguard against tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey		 
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey		 
Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey		 
There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey		 
If [anyone] can find in Title VII ... any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey		 
Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent and debate.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey		 
The ugliness of bigotry stands in direct contradiction to the very meaning of America.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey		 
There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey		 
None of us would trade freedom of expression for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey		 
All children behave as well as they are treated.
-- Jan Hunt		 
Gun control is part and parcel of the ongoing collectivist effort to eviscerate individual sovereignty and replace it with dependence upon and allegiance to the state.
-- Lawrence Hunter		 
Some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy ... The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups.
-- Samuel Huntington		 
How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.
-- Suzanna Gratia Hupp		 
Of course drugs were fun. And that's what's so stupid about anti-drug campaigns: they don't admit that. I can't say I feel particularly scarred or lessened by my experimentation with drugs. They've gotten a very bad name.
-- Anjelica Huston		 
A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues…is on the way to totalitarianism and death.
-- Robert M. Hutchins		 
The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed.
-- Robert M. Hutchins		 
Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.
-- Robert M. Hutchins		 
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
-- Robert M. Hutchins		 
Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.
-- Robert M. Hutchins		 
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
-- Aldous Huxley		 
I believe the State exists for the development of individual lives, not individuals for the development of the state.
-- Julian Huxley		 
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley		 
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley		 
My business is to bring my aspirations to conform to fact, not to try to harmonize fact with my aspirations.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley		 
...a man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley		 
What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley		 
Dignity does not float down from heaven it cannot be purchased nor manufactured. It is a reward reserved for those who labor with diligence.
-- Bill Hybels		 
Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.
-- Henry J. Hyde		 
The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as 'international bankers.' This little coterie... run our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen...[and] seizes...our executive officers... legislative bodies... schools... courts... newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.
-- John F. Hylan		 
The advantage of national planning is its ability to remove the wastes of oligopolistic anarchy, i.e. meaningless product differentiation and an imbalance between different industries within a geographical area. It concentrates all levels of decision making in one locale and thus provide each region with a full complement of skills and occupations. This opens up new horizons of local development by making possible the social and political control of economic decision-making. Multinational corporations, in contrast, weaken political control because they span many countries and can escape national regulation.
-- Stephen Hymer		 
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
-- Hypatia of Alexandria		 
Mistrust the people and they become untrustworthy.
-- I Ching		 
Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing.
-- Michael Iapoce		 
A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
-- Henrik Ibsen		 
You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
-- Henrik Ibsen		 
The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.
-- Henrik Ibsen		 
One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, ‘I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.
-- Henrik Ibsen		 
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can ever help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority.
-- Henrik Ibsen		 
The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society.
-- Henrik Ibsen		 
One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.
-- Henrik Ibsen		 
The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish.
-- Henrik Ibsen		 
At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.
-- Eric Idle		 
To come to know your enemy, first you must become his friend, and once you become his friend, all his defences come down. Then you can choose the most fitting method for his demise.
-- Tokugawa Ieyasu		 
Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.
-- George Iles		 
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
-- Ivan Illich		 
Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
-- Ivan Illich		 
It is precisely for the protection of the minority that constitutional limitations exist. Majorities need no such protection. They can take care of themselves.
-- Illinois Supreme Court		 
The most beautiful things in the universe are the starry heavens above us and the feeling of duty within us.
-- Indian Proverb		 
When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.
-- Indian Saying		 


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