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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
We are not final because we are infallible, but infallible only because we are final.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
Particularly when the war power is invoked to do things to the liberties of people, or to their property or economy that only indirectly affect conduct of the war and do not relate to the engagement of the war itself, the constitutional basis should be scrutinized with care. ... I would not be willing to hold that war powers may be indefinitely prolonged merely by keeping legally alive a state of war that had in fact ended. I cannot accept the argument that war powers last as long as the effects and consequences of war for if so they are permanent -- as permanent as the war debts.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it...No grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only a unanimity at the graveyard.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
There is no such thing as an achieved liberty: like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm -- in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
[T]he arguments that have been addressed to us lead me to utter more explicit misgivings about war powers than the Court has done. The Government asserts no constitutional basis for this legislation other than this vague, undefined and undefinable 'war power.' No one will question that this power is the most dangerous one to free government in the whole catalogue of powers. It is usually invoked in haste and excitement, when calm legislative consideration of constitutional limitation is difficult. It is executed in a time of patriotic fervor that makes moderation unpopular. And, worst of all, it is interpreted by judges under the influence of the same passions and pressures. Always, as in this case, the Government urges hasty decision to forestall some emergency or serve some purpose and pleads that paralysis will result if its claims to power are denied or their confirmation delayed.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson		 
The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth.
-- Thomas J. Jackson		 
The First Amendment says nothing about a right not to be offended. The risk of finding someone else's speech offensive is the price each of us pays for our own free speech. Free people don't run to court -- or to the principal -- when they encounter a message they don't like. They answer it with one of their own.
-- Jeff Jacoby		 
The radicals...want speech regulated by codes that proscribe certain language. They see free speech as at best a delusion, at worst a threat to the welfare of minorities and women....The most obvious (and cynical) explanation for the switched positions is the switched situations. Protesting students became established professors and administrators. For outsiders, free speech is bread and butter; for insiders, indigestion. To the new academics, unregulated free speech spells trouble.
-- Russell Jacoby		 
Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck.
-- Susan Jacoby		 
A free man is as jealous of his responsibilities as he is of his liberties.
-- Cyril James		 
When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
-- Dresden James		 
A war, even the most successfull one, is a national misfortune.
-- Helmuth James		 
Since National Socialism came to power, I have striven to make its consequences milder for its victims and to prepare the way for a change. In that, my conscience drove me -- and in the end, that is a man's duty.
-- Helmuth James		 
Today, not a numerous, but an active part of the German people are beginning to realize, not that they have been led astray, not that bad times await them, not that the war may end in defeat, but that what is happening is sin and that they are personally responsible for each terrible deed that has been committed -- naturally, not in the earthly sense, but as Christians.
-- Helmuth James		 
The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
-- William James		 
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
-- William James		 
There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
-- William James		 
The greatest discovery of any generation is that a living soul can alter his life by altering his attitude.
-- William James		 
Television has allowed us to create a common culture, and without it we would not have been able to accomplish our goal.
-- Dr. Morris Janowitz		 
If you believe everything you read, you better not read.
-- Japanese Proverb		 
The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour.
-- Japanese Proverb		 
The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy.
-- John Jay		 
The people are Sovereign. ... at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects... with none to govern but themselves; the citizens of America are equal as fellow citizens, and as joint tenants in the sovereignty.
-- John Jay		 
Those who own the country ought to govern it.
-- John Jay		 
The Jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy.
-- John Jay		 
Providence has given our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.
-- John Jay		 
The people who own the country ought to govern it.
-- John Jay		 
History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
-- Julian Jaynes		 
Choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
-- Thomas Jefferson (False)		 
We are all doubtless bound to contribute a certain portion of our income to the support of charitable and other useful public institutions. But it is a part of our duty also to apply our contributions in the most effectual way we can to secure this object. The question then is whether this will not be better done by each of us appropriating our whole contribution to the institutions within our reach, under our own eye, and over which we can exercise some useful control? Or would it be better that each should divide the sum he can spare among all the institutions of his State or the United States? Reason and the interest of these institutions themselves, certainly decide in favor of the former practice.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[The People] are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The general [federal] government will tend to monarchy, which will fortify itself from day to day, instead of working its own cures.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
We shall have our follies without doubt. Some one or more of them will always be afloat. But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry, not of Jesuitism. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I tolerate with utmost latitude the right of others to differ with me in opinion without imputing to them criminality. I know too well all the weaknesses and uncertainty of human reason to wonder at its different results.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Were parties here divided merely by a greediness for office,...to take a part with either would be unworthy of a reasonable or moral man.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Agriculture, manufacturers, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I know it will give great offence to the New England clergy, but the advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from them.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well organized and armed militia is their best security.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
You seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people' (10th Amendment). To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to any definition.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I cannot live without books.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty; and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
For the power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State (that is to say, of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It is unfortunate, that the efforts of mankind to recover the freedom of which they have been so long deprived, will be accompanied with violence, with errors, & even with crimes. But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations. ... Let me add that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation [the Senate], where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 

-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[N]othing in the Constitution has given [the judiciary] a right to decide for the Executive, more than to the executive to decide for them. Both magistracies are equally independent in the sphere of action assigned to them… the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what are not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the Legislature & Executive also, in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all Power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes [and] delegated to that government certain definite powers and whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force. To this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an integral party, its co-states forming, as to itself, the other party. The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution the measure of its powers.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
No man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[T]o consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions ... would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association -- the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength: 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 


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