Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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Those who formally rule take their signals and commands not from the electorate as a body, but from a small group of men (plus a few women). This group will be called the Establishment. It exists even though that existence is stoutly denied. It is one of the secrets of the American social order. ... A second secret is the fact that the existence of the Establishment -- the ruling class -- is not supposed to be discussed.
-- Arthur S. Miller		 
This truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of Capital to govern the world. By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished.
-- Sir Denison Miller		 
The biggest conspiracy has always been the fact that there is no conspiracy. Nobody's out to get you. Nobody gives a shit whether you live or die. There, you feel better now?
-- Dennis Miller		 
No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance.
-- Henry Miller		 
Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.
-- Henry Miller		 
The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.
-- Henry Miller		 
Laws do not curb the lawless. After all, that's why we call them 'lawless.'
-- Joel Miller		 
What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves.
-- Joel Miller		 
Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs, our policy against narcotics -- like any public policy -- comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties.
-- Joel Miller		 
To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.
-- Olin Miller		 
And let us remind readers regularly, in editorials, in our promotional advertising, in speeches to civic groups and others, that advertising helps people to live better and saves them money. This fact needs constant selling.
-- Paul Miller		 
The claim and exercise of a Constitutional right cannot be converted into a crime.
-- Miller v. U.S.		 
Welcome to the U.S. Capitol: Watch for falling expectations.
-- Wiley Miller		 
You won't find average Americans on the left or on the right. You'll find them at Kmart.
-- Zell Miller		 
The government of the world was [Cecil] Rhodes' simple desire.
-- Sarah Gertrude Millin		 
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.
-- C. Wright Mills		 
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose.
-- C. Wright Mills		 
If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you will do will surely obscure them. If you do not alarm anyone morally, you will yourself remain morally asleep. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.
-- C. Wright Mills		 
As a rule, panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.
-- John Mills		 
Prohibition was introduced as a fraud; it has been nursed as a fraud. It is wrapped in the livery of Heaven, but it comes to serve the devil. It comes to regulate by law our appetites and our daily lives. It comes to tear down liberty and build up fanaticism, hypocrisy, and intolerance. It comes to confiscate by legislative decree the property of many of our fellow citizens. It comes to send spies, detectives, and informers into our homes; to have us arrested and carried before courts and condemned to fines and imprisonments. It comes to dissipate the sunlight of happiness, peace, and prosperity in which we are now living and to fill our land with alienations, estrangements, and bitterness. It comes to bring us evil - only evil - and that continually. Let us rise in our might as one and overwhelm it with such indignation that we shall never hear of it again as long as grass grows and water runs.
-- Roger Quarles Mills		 
The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
-- A. A. Milne		 
None can love freedom but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license, which never hath more scope than under tyrants.
-- John Milton		 
The conquer'd, also, and enslaved by war, Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose.
-- John Milton		 
License they mean when they cry, Liberty! For who loves that, must first be wise and good.
-- John Milton		 
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
-- John Milton		 
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
-- John Milton		 
No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free.
-- John Milton		 
None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license.
-- John Milton		 
There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution.
-- John Milton		 
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
-- John Milton		 
The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.
-- John Milton		 
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them; they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
-- John Milton		 
When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for.
-- John Milton		 
For what can war but endless war still breed?
-- John Milton		 
Nations grow corrupt, love bondage more than liberty; bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.
-- John Milton		 
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
-- Charles Mingus		 
You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
-- Octave Mirbeau		 
Say not, when I have leisure I will study; you may not have leisure.
-- The Mishnah		 
The right of every citizen to keep and bear arms for the defense of his home, person, or property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall not be called in question, but the legislature may regulate or forbid carrying concealed weapons.
-- Mississippi Constitution		 
That the right of every citizen to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or when lawfully summoned in aid of the civil power, shall not be questioned; but this shall not justify the wearing of concealed weapons.
-- Missouri Constitution		 
Jim Creechan, a University of Alberta sociologist, said some of the love of guns may have its roots in Alberta's pervasive free-enterprise model of behaviour. 'It's the whole idea that the individual is more important than the collective.'
-- Alanna Mitchell		 
Compare this [U.S. taxation] to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor a third of their output and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us.
-- Daniel Mitchell		 
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
-- Margaret Mitchell		 
There is only one remedy for ignorance and thoughtlessness, and that is literacy. Millions and millions of children would today stand in no need of sex education or consumer education or anti-racism education or any of those fake educations, if they had had in the first place 'an' education.
-- Richard Mitchell		 
The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous.
-- Richard Mitchell		 
We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.
-- Richard Mitchell		 
Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.
-- Richard Mitchell		 
Where once a tyrant had to wish that his subjects had but one common neck that he might strangle them all at once, all he has to do now is to 'educate the people' so that they will have but one common mind to delude.
-- Richard Mitchell		 
Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars.
-- Richard Mitchell		 
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
-- Jessica Mitford		 
I want gay married people to be able to protect their marijuana plants with guns.
-- Tim Moen		 
Governments lie; bankers lie; even auditors sometimes lie: gold tells the truth.
-- Lord Rees Mogg		 
There is a First Amendment right to speak in an encrypted way… The right to speak P.G.P. is like the right to speak Navajo. The Government has no particular right to prevent you from speaking in a technical manner even if it is inconvenient for them to understand.
-- Eben Moglen		 
The ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.
-- Mohammed		 
A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.
-- Edgar J. Mohn		 
It is madness beyond compare To try to reform the world.
-- Molière		 
If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless, since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows.
-- Molière		 
Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.
-- Molière		 
If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless, since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows.
-- Molière		 
Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind’s totalization may flounder.
-- Thomas Molnar		 
Uniformity, therefore, is an essential built-in element of utopian existence, and it is no less important that this uniformity remain permanent.
-- Thomas Molnar		 
[In a republic,] it is not the people themselves who make the decisions, but the people they themselves choose to stand in their places.
-- James Monroe		 
Let us by wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties.
-- James Monroe		 
It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin.
-- James Monroe		 
How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism.
-- James Monroe		 
Of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trial by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny.
-- James Monroe		 
How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism.
-- James Monroe		 
Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect.
-- Thomas S. Monson		 
It is work, work that one delights in, that is the surest guarantor of happiness. But even here it is a work that has to be earned by labor in one's earlier years. One should labor so hard in youth that everything one does subsequently is easy by comparison.
-- Ashley Montagu		 
I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations.
-- Mary Wortley Montagu		 
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.
-- Ashley Montague		 
Trust is a two way street. If your government does not trust you, how can you trust your government?
-- Bruce Montague		 
A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie.
-- Charles Edward Montague		 
Discipline must come through liberty... We do not consider an individual disciplined when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.
-- Maria Montessori		 
No one can be free unless he is independent... In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence...
-- Maria Montessori		 
We fought the Revolutionary War for no taxation without representation, it seems to me that we are much worse off today, because we are heavily taxed, and only the king's corporations control this Country, together with mob rule, of the special interests.
-- James Montgomery		 
I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I have ever met.
-- Dwight Lyman Moody		 
If the political-correctness fascists get their way, we can safely assume it will be correct-thinking, “political cleansing” squads deciding what we can or cannot say on the Intenet. These people fear public debate and demand homogenization of “acceptable” attitudes compatible with their emotional, utopian idealism.
-- Charles W. Moore		 
Sitting here, we are not at liberty to add one jot of power to the national government beyond what the people have granted by the constitution; and, on the other hand, we are bound to support that constitution as it stands, and to give a fair and rational scope to all the powers which it clearly contains.
-- Houston v. Moore		 
[T]he income tax is incompatible with a free society. The IRS routinely intrudes on our basic civil liberties and privacy rights -- and its intrusions are getting worse all the time. I want an America where it is no longer the government's business how much money you make and what you do with it.
-- Stephen Moore		 
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
-- Thomas Moore		 
Better to dwell in freedom's hall, With a cold damp floor and mouldering wall, Than bow the head and bend the knee In the proudest palace of slaverie.
-- Thomas Moore		 
We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love.
-- Whitney Moore, Jr.		 
The wealthy, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day pluck and snatch away from the people some part of their daily living. Therefore, when I consider and weigh in my mind these commonwealths which nowadays do flourish, I perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men in procuring their own commodities under the name and authority of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely without fear of losing that which they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labor of the people for as little money and effort as possible.
-- Thomas More		 
I have not one doubt, even if I am in agreement with the National Rifle Association, that that kind of record keeping procedure [gun registration] is the first step to eventual confiscation under one administration or another.
-- Charles Morgan		 
One cannot shut ones eyes to things not seen with eyes.
-- Charles Langbridge Morgan		 
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face... one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.
-- Charles Langbridge Morgan		 
A man always has two reasons for what he does -- a good one, and the real one.
-- J. P. Morgan		 
Capital must protect itself in every way... Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.
-- J. P. Morgan (Questionable)		 
Populism is rising because liberals have become unbearable, Okay? And I speak as a liberal… Liberals have become utterly, pathetically illiberal and it’s a massive problem. What’s the point of calling yourself a liberal if you don’t allow anyone else to have a different view? You know, this snowflake culture we operate in, this victimhood culture that everyone, has to think in a certain way, behave a certain way. Everyone has to have a bleeding heart… You say a joke 10 years ago that offended somebody you can never host the Oscars… So what’s happening around the world? Populism is rising because people are fed up with the PC culture. They’re fed up with the snowflake culture. They’re fed up with everyone being offended by everything… They just want to tell people, not just how to lead their life but if you don’t lead it the way I tell you to, It’s a kind of version of fascism.
-- Piers Morgan		 
We can hardly expect the nation-state to make itself superfluous, at least not overnight. Rather what we must aim for is really nothing more than caretakers of a bankrupt international machine which will have to be transformed slowly into a new one. The transition will not be dramatic, but a gradual one. People will still cling to national symbols.
-- Henry Morgenthau, Jr.		 
We've been asleep for about 50 years. Ever since the end of World War II we just steadily handed our future and our bank accounts and now our children, handed them all over to the federal government...
-- Michael Moriarty		 
National Health? Socialized pension funds? State-controlled television? Search and seizure laws? Forfeiture laws? If we're not living in the Soviet Union of the United States we certainly have returned to 1776 and 'taxation without representation.'
-- Michael Moriarty		 
If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.... The beauty and cogency of the preamble, reaching back to remotest antiquity and forward to an infinite future, having lifted the hearts of millions of men and will continue to do.... These words are more revolutionary than anything written by Robespierre, Marx, or Lenin, more explosive than the atom, a continual challenge to ourselves as well as an inspiration to the oppressed of all the world.
-- Samuel Eliot Morison		 
If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.
-- Samuel Eliot Morison		 
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
-- Christopher Darlington Morley		 
Since people, in a competitive or any other society, are by no means always just to each other, some regulation by the state in its capacity of umpire is unavoidable, What must be kept in mind is that the greatest injustice of all is done when the umpire forgets that he too is bound by the rules, and begins to make them as between contestants in behalf of his own prejudices.
-- Felix Morley		 
[L]iberty, or the absence of coercion, or the leaving people to think, speak, and act as they please, is in itself a good thing. It is the object of a favourable presumption. The burden of proving it inexpedient always lies, and wholly lies, on those who wish to abridge it by coercion, whether direct or indirect.
-- John Morley		 
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
-- John Viscount Morley		 
The political spirit is the great force in throwing the love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place.
-- John Viscount Morley		 


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