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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
A nation with a goofy foreign policy needs a very serious policy of defense.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 -- to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
The term consumerism has been current since the middle 1960s, about the same length of time as the Department of Transportation itself. Literally interpreted, the word means 'an ideology based on the opposite of being productive.' This ideology has caused enormous changes in the American economy. At one time complaining was a cottage industry. The typical maker of complaints gave them to (or traded them with) friends and family members. Sometimes the complaints were sent to newspapers or included in prayers. Friends, family, the press and God then ignored the complaints. In the sixties, however, various consumer advocates began to help complainers find a market for their wares. There is only one organization that is required to take everyone -- and their complaints -- seriously. So the government became the foremost grumble customer. And it is, of course, the government's bureaucratic agencies who have to do the buying.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
The three branches of government number considerably more than three and are not, in any sense, 'branches' since that would imply that there is something they are all attached to besides self-aggrandizement and our pocketbooks. ... Government is not a machine with parts; it's an organism. When does an intestine quit being an intestine and start becoming an asshole?
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Whatever it is the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert, and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Government isn't a good way to solve problems ... [G]overnment is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. ... [G]overnment is wasteful of the nation's resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. ... [G]overnment is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence or fame.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Now majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But, like other precious, sacred things…it’s not only worth dying for, it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all life were determined by majority rule. Every meal would be a pizza.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Think of what big governments have gotten up to in this century : not one, but two world wars, the gulag, the holocaust, aerial bombing of civilian population centers, the Berlin Wall, nuclear explosions, the post office. A wicked individual might want these, but he wouldn't have the cash and connections to get them. A villainous corporation could afford them but has to market the products. The Vietnam draft would be a tough sell for even the most fiendish businessmen. "Get shot! Get killed! Get diseases from foreign women who despise you in their hearts!
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Whatever it is that government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government do it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
The main reason to be opposed to political control of smoking is to keep power --even the smallest and silliest kind of power -- out of the hands of ... members of a dangerous class --the class that knows what´s good for us better than we do.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe. When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
When a government controls both the economic power of individuals and the coercive power of the state ... this violates a fundamental rule of happy living: Never let the people with all the money and the people with all the guns be the same people.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
If you are young and you drink a great deal it will spoil your health, slow your mind, make you fat -- in other words, turn you into an adult.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are legislators.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please.  And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
-- P. J. O'Rourke		 
Declaration of Orders We Will NOT Obey. Recognizing that we each swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and affirming that we are guardians of the Republic, of the principles in our Declaration of Independence, and of the rights of our people, we affirm and declare the following:\\\\ 1. We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.\\ 2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people.\\ 3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as "unlawful enemy combatants" or to subject them to military tribunal.\\ 4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.\\ 5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.\\ 6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.\\ 7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.\\ 8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to "keep the peace" or to "maintain control."\\ 9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.\\ 10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
-- Oath Keepers		 
Of course, there's been a real debate about where to invest and where to cut, and I'm committed to working with members of both parties to cut our deficits and debt. But we can't simply cut our way to prosperity.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
Yes, you’ve worked hard, but you’ve also been lucky. That’s a pet peeve of mine: People who have been successful and don’t realize they’ve been lucky. That God may have blessed them; it wasn’t nothing you did.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
[J]ust because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right...
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
[P]art of people’s concern is just the sense that around the world the old order isn’t holding and we’re not quite yet to where we need to be in terms of a new order that’s based on a different set of principles, that’s based on a sense of common humanity, that’s based on economies that work for all people.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
The problem is that the way [President] Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion dollars for the first 42 presidents -- number 43 added $4 trillion dollars by his lonesome -- so that we now have over $9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back. [That's] $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
When Michelle and I decided that I would run for President, it was because of a shared belief in the power of community and connection, a commitment to the idea that we are our brothers' keepers.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government's reckless fiscal policies. ... Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency previously declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States. Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2010.
-- Barack Hussein Obama		 
I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
-- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez		 
We never experienced, really, a time of true economic prosperity in the United States.
-- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez		 
Show me the prison, Show me the jail,\\ Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale.\\ And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why\\ And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
-- Phil Ochs		 
Should we believe self-serving, ever-growing drug enforcement/drug treatment bureaucrats, whose pay and advancement depends on finding more and more people to arrest and "treat"? More Americans die in just one day in prisons, penitentiaries, jails and stockades than have ever died from marijuana throughout history. Who are they protecting? From what?
-- Dr. Fred Oerther		 
No external force will ever succeed in making you 'want what you do not want and believe what you do not believe'. A man may take my life, but not my faith.
-- Gerhard Oestreich		 
I have been reading a German book. We must draft a decree at once... Communal physical exercises. ... This is very important. The health of the nation depends on it.
-- The Emperor of Azania		 
Under the Equal Protection clause, not to mention the First Amendment itself, government may not grant the use of a forum to people whose views it finds acceptable, but deny use to those wishing to express less favored or more controversial views.
-- Supreme Court Of The United States		 
We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
-- Charlton Ogburn, Jr.		 
As hard as modern man strives to be free he is a slave chained to the past.
-- Suso Ohno		 
A theory that a conspiracy has been working consciously for many centuries is not very plausible unless one attributes to them a religious unity. That is tantamount to regarding them as Satanists engaged in the worship and service of supernatural evil. The directors of the conspiracy must see or otherwise directly perceive manifestations which convince them of the existence and power of Lucifer. And since subtle conspirators must be very shrewd men, not likely to be deceived by auto-suggestion, hypnosis, or drugs, we should have to conclude that they probably are in contact with a force of pure evil.
-- Revilo P. Oliver		 
The paternalist project for our civil courts runs something as follows. After the revolution -- which perhaps has already taken place—the average citizen will enjoy a vast array of wonderful new rights to sue other people. You will be empowered to haul your neighbors and fellow citizens to court if you feel they have fallen short of good faith and fair play. You will be entitled to sue them for unlimited damages, punitive as well as compensatory, even over behavior that had previously been thought not subject to liability at all. Everyone will be under a vague but stringent obligation to look out for your safety and welfare, enforceable by legal action. You will enjoy a cornucopia of contention opportunities, a smorgasbord of suing options, a Lotus-land of litigability.
-- Walter Olsen		 
Sometimes, when leading families or merchants organized a government for their city, they not only provided for some power sharing through voting but took pains to reduce the probability that the government's chief executive could assume autocratic power. For a time in Genoa, for example, the chief administrator of the government had to be an outsider -- and thus someone with no membership in any of the powerful families in the city. Moreover, he was constrained to a fixed term of office, forced to leave the city after the end of his term, and forbidden from marrying into any of the local families. In Venice, after a doge who attempted to make himself autocrat was beheaded for his offense, subsequent doges were followed in official processions by a sword-bearing symbolic executioner as a reminder of the punishment intended for any leader who attempted to assume dictatorial power.
-- Mancur Olson		 
The modern press itself is a new phenomenon. Its typical unit is the great agency of mass communication. These agencies can facilitate thought and discussion. They can stifle it…. They can play up or down the news and its significance, foster and feed emotions, create complacent fictions and blind spots, misuse the great words and uphold empty slogans.
-- Commission On Freedom Of The Press		 
Protection against government is now not enough to guarantee that a man who has something to say shall have a chance to say it. The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public.
-- Commission On Freedom Of The Press		 
If we can revolutionize opinion about social organization so that we can rid ourselves of arbitrary political interventions in economic and social life, we won’t need a world police force; if we can’t change opinion in this area in favor of a strictly limited government, a world police force would either be helpless to prevent war or would be the worst tyranny history has known.
-- Reverend Edmund Opitz		 
No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights.
-- Rev. Edmund A. Opitz		 
There is a place for government in the affairs of men, and our Declaration of Independence tells us precisely what that place is. The role of government is to protect individuals in their God-given individual rights. Freedom is the natural birthright of man, but all that government can do in behalf of freedom is to let the individual alone, and it should secure him in his rights by making others let him alone.
-- Rev. Edmund A. Opitz		 
They can only set free men free ... And there is no need of that: Free men set themselves free.
-- James Oppenheim		 
As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer		 
There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer		 
In all criminal cases whatever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law, and the facts under the direction of the Court as to the law, and the right of new trials as in civil cases.
-- Oregon Constitution		 
This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies.
-- José Ortega y Gasset		 
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
-- José Ortega y Gasset		 
I am I plus my circumstances.
-- José Ortega y Gasset		 
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
-- José Ortega y Gasset		 
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
-- George Orwell		 
At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.
-- George Orwell		 
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
-- George Orwell		 
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
-- George Orwell		 
The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
-- George Orwell		 
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidarity to pure wind.
-- George Orwell		 
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
-- George Orwell		 
Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
-- George Orwell (False)		 
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
-- George Orwell		 
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
-- George Orwell		 
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
-- George Orwell		 
Freedom is Slavery
-- George Orwell		 
The ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle, home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics, he feels himself master of his fate. But otherwise he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.
-- George Orwell		 
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ...
-- George Orwell		 
All animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others.
-- George Orwell		 
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-- George Orwell		 
The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.
-- George Orwell		 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- George Orwell		 
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
-- George Orwell		 
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.
-- George Orwell		 
To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.
-- George Orwell		 
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
-- George Orwell		 
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is “not done”… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
-- George Orwell		 
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
-- George Orwell		 
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
-- George Orwell		 
Loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature... The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
-- George Orwell		 
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
-- George Orwell		 
The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders.
-- George Orwell		 
Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
-- George Orwell		 
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
-- George Orwell		 
Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.
-- George Orwell		 
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
-- George Orwell		 
Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.
-- John Osborne		 
Being Politically Correct means always having to say you're sorry.
-- Charles Osgood		 
There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the Law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free, and they have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves so, if they please.
-- James Otis		 
Taxation without representation is tyranny.
-- James Otis		 
If it would be wrong for the government to adopt an official religion, then, for the same reasons, it would be wrong for the government to adopt official education policies. The moral case for freedom of religion stands or falls with that for freedom of education. A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do.
-- James R. Otteson		 
Petty laws breed great crimes.
-- Ouida		 
In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes.
-- P. D. Ouspensky		 
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
-- P. D. Ouspensky		 


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