Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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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		 
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
-- Ovid		 
It is annoying to be honest to no purpose.
-- Ovid		 
Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor. (I see the better way, and approve it; I follow the worse.)
-- Ovid		 
Can anybody point me to that one time in history where the side that was demanding censorship, segregation, propaganda, radical education, papers to move freely in society, plus government forces going door to door to demand compliance were the good guys?
-- Candace Owens		 
Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?
-- Count Axel Oxenstierna		 
The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded.
-- Vance Packard		 
It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.
-- Camille Paglia		 
Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.... Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was.
-- Judge James Paine		 
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church.
-- Thomas Paine		 
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.
-- Thomas Paine		 
This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still.
-- Thomas Paine		 
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
-- Thomas Paine		 
I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel ... for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.
-- Thomas Paine		 
It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of Freedom, to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those that are governed: but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.
-- Thomas Paine		 
But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes?
-- Thomas Paine		 
Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
-- Thomas Paine		 
If there must be trouble let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
-- Thomas Paine		 
A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.
-- Thomas Paine		 
For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?
-- Thomas Paine		 
Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Character is much easier kept than recovered.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The most formidable weapons against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them...
-- Thomas Paine		 
As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all government to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ...
-- Thomas Paine		 
Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
-- Thomas Paine		 
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech and practically construct them into syntax.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness.
-- Thomas Paine		 
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self-defense. The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms, like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world as well as property. The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside... Horrid mischief would ensue were (the good) deprived of the use of them ... the weak will become a prey to the strong.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Time makes more converts than reason.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Arms, like laws, discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Age after age has passed away, for no other purpose than to behold their wretchedness.
-- Thomas Paine		 
A constitution defines and limits the powers of the government it creates. It therefore follows, as a natural and also a logical result, that the governmental exercise of any power not authorized by the constitution is an assumed power, and therefore illegal.
-- Thomas Paine		 
From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms!\\ Through the land let the sound of it flee;\\ Let the far and the near all unite, with a cheer,\\ In defense of our Liberty Tree.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.
-- Thomas Paine		 
A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Reason obeys itself; and ignorance does whatever is dictated to it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the `end of time,’ or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it. ... Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it.
-- Thomas Paine		 
Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides.
-- Thomas Paine		 
There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes.
-- Thomas Paine		 
But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.
-- Thomas Paine		 
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
-- Thomas Paine		 
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
-- Thomas Paine		 
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
-- Thomas Paine		 
The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood.
-- Thomas Paine		 
L'individualisme est une doctrine qui, au lieu de subordonner l'individu à la collectivité, pose en principe que l'individu a sa fin en lui-même; qu'en fait et en droit il possède une valeur propre et une existence autonome, et que l'idéal social est le plus complet affranchissement de l'individu. L'individualisme ainsi compris est la même chose que ce qu'on appelle encore la philosophie sociale libertaire.
-- Georges Palante		 
Natural liberty is the right of common upon a waste; civil liberty is the safe, exclusive, unmolested enjoyment of a cultivated enclosure.
-- William Paley		 
Television, I would say, isn't an advertising medium. It's a selling medium.
-- William S. Paley		 
Socialism is workable only in Heaven where it isn’t needed, and in Hell where they've got it.
-- Cecil Palmer		 
[L]et me point out that libertarians defend a tradition of liberty that is the fruit of thousands of years of human history.
-- Tom G. Palmer		 
If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?
-- Tom G. Palmer		 
Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position.
-- Mario Palmieri		 
Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position.
-- Mario Palmieri		 
The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.
-- Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit		 
Capital punishment is when Washington comes up with a new tax.
-- Van Panopoulos		 
Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn math and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.
-- Seymour Papert		 
Thoughts are free and are subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature.
-- Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus		 
When you sit down to negotiate on what you already have, you lose.
-- Marie J. Parente		 
The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.
-- Michael Parenti		 
If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed.
-- Michael Parenti		 
The enormous gap between what U.S. leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.
-- Michael Parenti		 
The end and aim of all education is the development of character.
-- Francis W. Parker		 
This leftist political strategy to win office and power relies on something very powerful: the desire to increase the number of Americans who are dependent on getting money that is taken from other citizens.  Sadly, this strategy has worked for half a century! And now it works because Americans who are trapped in this nightmare do not want their government money taken away from them!
-- Star Parker		 
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
-- C. Northcote Parkinson		 
With the monetary system we have now, the careful saving of a lifetime can be wiped out in an eyeblink.
-- Larry Parks		 
If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states, then the juror has accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty.
-- Justice Theophilus Parsons		 
If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states, then the juror has accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty.
-- Justice Theophilus Parsons		 
But, sir, the people themselves have it in their power effectually to resist usurpation, without being driven to an appeal of arms. An act of usurpation is not obligatory; it is not law; and any man may be justified in his resistance. Let him be considered as a criminal by the general government, yet only his fellow-citizens can convict him; they are his jury, and if they pronounce him innocent, not all the powers of Congress can hurt him; and innocent they certainly will pronounce him, if the supposed law he resisted was an act of usurpation.
-- Theophilus Parsons		 
The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who comes from the best family.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
Justice without force is impotent, force without justice is tyranny. Unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
It is not our task to secure the triumph of truth, but merely to fight on its behalf.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
The art of revolutionizing and overturning states is to undermine established customs, by going back to their origin, in order to mark their want of justice.
-- Blaise Pascal		 
Never trust governments absolutely and always do what you can to prevent them from doing too much harm.
-- John Arthur Passmore		 
The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.
-- Boris Pasternak		 
When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves.
-- George Pataki		 


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