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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press 3.
-- Alice Kahn		 
The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write.
-- David Kahn		 
As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny.
-- Otto Hermann Kahn		 
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change.
-- Otto Hermann Kahn		 
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.
-- Otto Hermann Kahn		 
Persecution, whenever it occurs, establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor, not the truth and worth of his belief.
-- H. M. Kallen		 
It is a paradox of modern life that speech, although highly prized, enjoys its great protection in part because it is so often of no concern to anyone. To an alarming degree, tolerance depends not on principle, but on indifference.
-- Harry Kalven, Jr.		 
Seditious libel is the doctrine that flourished in England during and after the Star Chamber. It is the hallmark of closed societies throughout the world. Under it criticism of government is viewed as defamation and punished as a crime.
-- Harry Kalven, Jr.		 
The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
War itself requires no special motive but appears to be engrafted on human nature; it passes even for something noble, to which the love of glory impels men quite apart from any selfish urges. Thus among the American savages, just as much as among those of Europe during the age of chivalry, military valor is held to be of great worth in itself, not only during war (which is natural) but in order that there should be war. Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, "War is an evil inasmuch as it produces more wicked men than it takes away." So much for the measures nature takes to lead the human race, considered as a class of animals, to her own end.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
The human heart refuses to believe in a universe without purpose.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
Freedom is alone the unoriginated birthright of man; it belongs to him by force of his humanity, and is in dependence on the will and coaction of every other, in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
Everyone may seek his own happiness in the way that seems good to himself, provided that he infringe not such freedom of others to strive after a similar end as is consistent with the freedom of all according to a possible general law.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
GATT represents the New World Order in trade.
-- Mickey Kantor		 
Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
-- Abraham Kaplan		 
Drug offenses ... may be regarded as the prototypes of non-victim crimes today. The private nature of the sale and use of these drugs has led the police to resort to methods of detection and surveillance that intrude upon our privacy, including illegal search, eavesdropping, and entrapment. Indeed, the successful prosecution of such cases often requires police infringement of the constitutional protections that safeguard the privacy of individuals.
-- John Kaplan		 
We simply do not catch a high enough percentage of users to make the law a real threat, although we do catch enough to seriously overburden our legal system.
-- John Kaplan		 
It is, therefore, a fact of law and of practical necessity that individuals are responsible for their own personal safety, and that of their loved ones. Police protection must be recognized for what it is: only an auxiliary general deterrent.
-- Peter Alan Kasler		 
Ironically, the only gun control in 19th century England was the policy forbidding police to have arms while on duty.
-- Don B. Kates, Jr.		 
Americans have an extraordinary love-hate relationship with the rich culture they’ve created. They buy, watch and read it even as they ban, block and condemn it.
-- Jon Katz		 
Simply according artistic works the same protection as nonartistic works may not be sufficient to protect creativity. After all, the very essence of artistic expression is invention and artists necessarily draw on their own experience. But if the rules of liability are unclear, artists will not be able to know how much disguise is sufficient to protect their claims from the claims of those who may see themselves in the portrayals.
-- Irving Kaufman		 
Professionalism implies knowledge based in evidence, not in authority. Such lines are blurred in the era of identity politics and the normalization of pseudo-disciplines such as Gender Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Fat Studies, Disability Studies, Chicano Studies and White Studies and Indigenous Studies, all of which are taught based on the “authority” of Marxism, and all of whose primary purpose is to demonize “oppressors” – the “patriarchy,” white “colonialists” and the U.S. in general – and to recruit activists for organized perpetuation of the identity grievance industry.
-- Barbara Kay		 
Monetary policy today is guided by little more than government fiat -- by the calculations, often mistaken economic theories, and whims of central bankers or, even worse, politicians. Under such a regime, inflation of three or four percent annually has come to be viewed as a stellar monetary performance. However, under a more sound monetary system -- i.e., a gold standard -- such increases in the general price level would be seen as wildly inflationary.
-- Raymond J. Keating		 
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
-- John Keats		 
In the long vista of the years to roll,\\ Let me not see my country's honor fade;\\ Oh! let me see our land retain its soul!\\ Her pride in Freedom, and not Freedom's shade.
-- John Keats		 
Beauty is truth, truth beauty," That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
-- John Keats		 
Any philosophy worth considering must attempt to account for the existence of evil in the world.
-- Elie Kedourie		 
My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.
-- Garrison Keillor		 
You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion.
-- Garrison Keillor		 
As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs.
-- Sir Arthur Keith		 
The highest result of education is tolerance.
-- Helen Keller		 
Security is mostly superstition.
-- Helen Keller		 
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
-- Helen Keller		 
No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.
-- Helen Keller		 
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
-- Helen Keller		 
I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
-- Helen Keller		 
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
-- Helen Keller		 
To say "I have to" is to speak the language of compulsion, duty, authority -- the language of injunctions imposed on us from without. Objectivism is not a duty ethic, but an ethic of values, the ultimate value being one's own life and happiness. The language of values is "I want" and "I will": I want this, and I will do what it takes to get it.
-- David Kelley		 
Dividing the political positions into liberal versus conservative is itself a leading example of [an old conceptual framework that organizes the world into categories and stereotypes] shared by journalists and media activists alike. As a result, it has taken decades for libertarians in the United States to break through this conventional view of the political spectrum and gain recognition as a distinct point of view. Over and above any hostility journalists had to free-market views, there was no conceptual space within their conventional wisdom for a political philosophy that combined free markets and free minds.
-- David Kelley		 
The case for a free society rests on individualism. ... Every form of totalitarianism has sought control over the minds of individuals, and has understood that it must first undermine the individual’s confidence in the validity of his own faculties. Remember O’Brien’s speech to Winston Smith in Orwell’s '1984'
-- David Kelley		 
The US government devotes massive resources and much sophistication to killing in Afghanistan. Would that it would spend a little to realize that its policies are creating anger. . . . It costs about $1 million a year for a US soldier -- boots on the ground -- in Afghanistan. Imagine what good that money could do if spent to help the Afghan people. A governor in Afghanistan makes about $1,000 a year.
-- Kathy Kelly		 
We have met the enemy and he is us.
-- Walt Kelly		 
Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.
-- Jack Kemp		 
Democracy without morality is impossible.
-- Jack Kemp		 
But because many endeavor to get knowledge rather than to live well, they are often deceived and reap little or no benefit from their labor.
-- Thomas Kempis		 
Activate yourself to duty by remembering your position, who you are, and what you have obliged yourself to be.
-- Thomas Kempis		 
It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
-- Sally Kempton		 
Integrity is the core of our character.
-- L. Lionel Kendrick		 
Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.
-- George F. Kennan		 
Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ... is simply not a possibility in the modern age.
-- George F. Kennan		 
The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.
-- George F. Kennan		 
The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
Respondents maintain that prayer must be nonsectarian … and they fault the town for permitting guest chaplains to deliver prayers that ‘use overtly Christian terms’ or ‘invoke specifics of Christian theology.’ … An insistence on nonsectarian or ecumenical prayer as a single, fixed standard is not consistent with the tradition of legislative prayer. … The Congress that drafted the First Amendment would have been accustomed to invocations containing explicitly religious themes of the sort respondents find objectionable. One of the Senate’s first chaplains, the Rev. William White, gave prayers in a series that included the Lord’s Prayer, the Collect for Ash Wednesday, prayers for peace and grace, a general thanksgiving, St. Chrysostom’s Prayer, and a prayer seeking ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, &c …'
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
From the earliest days of the Nation, these invocations have been addressed to assemblies comprising many different creeds. … Our tradition assumes that adult citizens, firm in their own beliefs, can tolerate and perhaps appreciate a ceremonial prayer delivered by a person of a different faith.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
Respondents argue, in effect, that legislative prayer may be addressed only to a generic God. The law and the Court could not draw this line for each specific prayer or seek to require ministers to set aside their nuanced and deeply personal beliefs for vague and artificial ones. There is doubt, in any event, that consensus might be reached as to what qualifies as generic or nonsectarian.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
While these prayers vary in their degree of religiosity, they often seek peace for the Nation, wisdom for its lawmakers, and justice for its people, values that count as universal and that are embodied not only in religious traditions, but in our founding documents and laws. … The first prayer delivered to the Continental Congress by the Rev. Jacob Duché on Sept. 7, 1774, provides an example: ‘Be Thou present O God of Wisdom and direct the counsel of this Honorable Assembly; enable them to settle all things on the best and surest foundations; that the scene of blood may be speedily closed; that Order, Harmony, and Peace be effectually restored, and the Truth and Justice, Religion and Piety, prevail and flourish among the people. Preserve the health of their bodies, and the vigor of their minds, shower down on them, and the millions they here represent, such temporal Blessings as Thou seest expedient for them in this world, and crown them with everlasting Glory in the world to come. All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Saviour, Amen.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
The decidedly Christian nature of these prayers must not be dismissed as the relic of a time when our Nation was less pluralistic than it is today. Congress continues to permit its appointed and visiting chaplains to express themselves in a religious idiom. … To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures … and the courts … to act as … censors of religious speech. … Government may not mandate a civic religion that stifles any but the most generic reference to the sacred any more than it may prescribe a religious orthodoxy …
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
Academic freedom really means freedom of inquiry. To be able to probe according to one’s own interest, knowledge and conscience is the most important freedom the scholar has, and part of that process is to state its results.
-- Donald Kennedy		 
You've got to rattle your cage door. You've got to let them know that you're in there, and that you want out. Make noise. Cause trouble. You may not win right away, but you'll sure have a lot more fun.
-- Florynce Kennedy		 
Freedom is like taking a bath -- you have to keep doing it every day!
-- Florynce Kennedy		 
Big Governments make for small citizens.
-- James Ronald Kennedy and Walter Donald Kennedy		 
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy; or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve -- and I believe this can be done -- a budget surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
There is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget.... As the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues. Prosperity is the real way to balance our budget. By lowering tax rates, by increasing jobs and income, we can expand tax revenues and finally bring our budget into balance.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizen of this plight.
-- John F. Kennedy (Questionable)		 
If we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
... By calling attention to a well-regulated militia for the security of the Nation, and the right of each citizen to keep and bear arms, our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fear of governmental tyranny, which gave rise to the 2nd amendment, will ever be a major danger to our Nation, the amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic military-civilian relationship, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the 2nd Amendment will always be important.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers -- and this is the basis of all human morality.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The quality of American life must keep pace with the quantity of American goods. This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We must use time as a tool, not as a crutch.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics but for our contributions to the human spirit.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Forgive, but never forget.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
-- John F. Kennedy		 


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