Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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While I live I will never resort to irredeemable paper.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of people would die for Him.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
I want a situation without censorship, because I do not want to be responsible for whatever they may say.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.
-- Kit Bond		 
From the rostrum of the United Nations, we shall convince the colonial and semicolonial people to liberate themselves and to spread the Communist theory all over the world.
-- Soviet General Pantelei Bondarenko		 
The trouble with gold is that it turns its back on world improvers, empire builders and do-gooders.
-- Bill Bonner		 
The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn't have on things he doesn't need -- we're done for.
-- Bill Bonner		 
Whose service is perfect freedom.
-- Book of Common Prayer		 
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
-- Daniel Boorstin		 
Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful.
-- Neal Boortz		 
I can’t think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be.
-- Neal Boortz		 
You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'
-- Neal Boortz		 
Why is it when times get rough only the people have to look for ways to cut back?  Why is this always just absolutely impossible for government?
-- Neal Boortz		 
Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one.  Once again -- the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states.  Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches.  You won’t find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years.
-- Neal Boortz		 
THE most widespread form of child abuse in the United States is parents' sending children to the government to be educated.
-- Neal Boortz		 
How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?
-- Neal Boortz		 
This kind of rhetoric should be familiar to any who lived through the McCarthy era of the 1950s. It allows for no differences, not agreement to disagree, among adults or children.
-- David Booth		 
No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right.
-- William E. Borah		 
Who could impose such socialistic confiscatory rates?
-- William E. Borah		 
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
-- William E. Borah		 
Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen.
-- William E. Borah		 
Social Security is an unfunded pay-as-you-go system, fundamentally flawed and analogous in design to illegal pyramid schemes. Government accounting creates the illusion of a trust fund, but in fact, excess receipts are spent immediately. The government’s own actuaries predict the system will be bankrupt by 2030, but Social Security could face financial crisis as early as 2014. Moreover, Social Security’s relatively poor rate of return makes the program an increasingly worse investment for today’s young worker. ... The system design itself is fundamentally flawed and cannot be repaired. It must instead be replaced by one derived from free markets and operated by free citizenry making individual economic decisions in their own self-interest. ... Reform is long overdue. If we fail to act soon, our children will either inherit a bankrupt system or be forced to pay an impossibly high level of taxes. Only private pensions with individual property rights to accumulate fund balances can create a secure pension system. Chile, which privatized its system in 1981, provides evidence of such a system’s effectiveness.
-- Karl Borden		 
If a state militia guarantee rather than an individual right of citizens to keep and bear arms were the purpose of the second Amendment, it would have been totally unnecessary and irrelevant to include any guarantee of “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” since by its very nature a militia is necessarily an armed force and without arms it would be impossible to carry out its constitutional functions of suppressing insurrections and repelling invasions.
-- Bernard J. Bordonet		 
Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.
-- Dr. Jim Boren		 
Every bureaucrat has a constitutional right to fuzzify, profundify and drivelate. It's a part of our freedom of speech...If people can understand what is being said in Washington, they might want to take over their own government again.
-- Dr. Jim Boren		 
Public apathy is more powerful than public opinion. There's more of it.
-- Dr. Jim Boren		 
When in charge, ponder... When in trouble, delegate... When in doubt, mumble.
-- Dr. Jim Boren		 
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
-- Jorge Luis Borges		 
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges		 
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
-- Jorge Luis Borges		 
As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago.
-- Judge Robert Bork		 
The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings.
-- Judge Robert Bork		 
[A] society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.
-- Robert Bork		 
I don't think the Constitution is studied almost anywhere, including law schools. In law schools, what they study is what the court said about the Constitution. They study the opinions. They don't study the Constitution itself.
-- Robert Bork		 
Only the suppressed word is dangerous.
-- Ludwig Börne		 
A functioning police state needs no police.
-- William S. Borroughs		 
This country is not pro-American. It is United States property.
-- Juan Bosch		 
Who lies for you will lie against you.
-- Bosnian Proverb		 
[It is] a natural Right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the [English] Bill of rights, to keep arms for their own defense; and as Mr. Blackstone observes, it is to be made use of when the sanctions of Society and law are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.
-- Boston Evening Post		 
When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover that check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money.
-- Boston Federal Reserve Bank		 
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
-- James Boswell		 
Firearms, especially long guns, occupy a noble place in Canadian history since they are no doubt responsible for the exploitation of a vast and wild territory that had long remained untouched. From 1534 until 1979 (!), the importance of firearms remained uncontested. More than a simple tool of everyday life, they became truly a phenomenon of civilization. At all times and whoever he was, the Canadian was directly in contact with firearms, and he cannot be imagined otherwise. Even today, this symbol of liberty remains intimately related to wide, open spaces, and to a tolerant society. It is the distinctive mark of today's and yesterday's America. Here, in New France, let's repeat it, it is not only soldiers and nobles who have the possibility or privilege to bear arms. Century-old Canadian customs recognize equally to everybody the legal and moral right to acquire a firearm and to use it freely and noncoercively.
-- Russel Bouchard		 
Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.
-- Elias Boudinot		 
Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.
-- Kenneth Boulding		 
A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.
-- Kenneth Boulding		 
Ideas are to literature what light is to painting.
-- Paul Bourget		 
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society these irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.
-- Randolph Bourne		 
War is the health of the State.
-- Randolph Bourne		 
Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it! ... If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished -- in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad. The American Dream will then die -- on battlefields all over the world -- and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations.
-- George S. Boutwell		 
To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck.
-- James Bovard		 
Its contempt for citizens ... is so routine, and so unlimited, that the agency has become a kind of Frankenstein, running wild and terrorizing Americans at will. The IRS hypocritically requires mistake-free returns when its own books are in shambles. It demands exorbitant sums of money without regard to the accuracy of its claims. It doesn’t hesitate to use every possible maneuver to get what it wants, sometimes destroying businesses -- and lives -- in the process.
-- James Bovard		 
As we learned from the Clinton administration and much of the media, a machine gun in the hands of a federal agent is now a symbol of benevolence and concern for a child's well-being.
-- James Bovard		 
The people = government doctrine is equivalent to political infantilism -- an agreement to pretend that the citizen's wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him.
-- James Bovard		 
Subsidies entail politicians’ taking the citizen’s paycheck and then using it to buy his submission.
-- James Bovard		 
Assault weapons laws resemble hate speech laws. Hate speech laws usually begin by targeting a few words that almost no one approves. Once the system for controlling and punishing “hate speech” is put into place, there is little or nothing to stop it from expanding to punish more and more types of everyday speech. Similarly, once an assault weapons law is on the books, there is little to prevent politicians from vastly increasing the number of weapons banned under the law. The main effect of banning assault weapons is to give government an excuse to arrest and imprison millions of Americans while doing little or nothing to reduce crime. America has a limited number of police, and politicians must decide who the real public enemies are. If Mr. Clinton signs an assault weapons ban, it could signal the start of an attack on gun owners’ constitutional rights that could far surpass all previous gun bans.
-- James Bovard		 
The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur.
-- James Bovard		 
However accurate or inaccurate the agency’s numbers may be, tax law explicitly presumes that the IRS is always right -- and implicitly presumes that the taxpayer is always wrong -- in any dispute with the government. In many cases, the IRS introduces no evidence whatsoever of its charges; it merely asserts that a taxpayer had a certain amount of unreported income and therefore owes a proportionate amount in taxes, plus interest and penalties.
-- James Bovard		 
No-knock police raids destroy Americans’ right to privacy and safety. People’s lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants. ... Unfortunately, no-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justified nullifying the Fourth Amendment. ... No-knock raids in response to alleged narcotics violations presume that the government should have practically unlimited power to endanger some people’s lives in order to control what others ingest.
-- James Bovard		 
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
-- James Bovard		 
Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians.
-- Chester Bowles		 
The government expands at will, based on what might be charitably called flimsy constitutional reasoning and less charitably and more accurately called arrogant judicial tyranny. Government authority these days rarely comes from the Constitution as written but from the last carefully crafted misinterpretation of it. This is called legal precedent.
-- Linda Bowles		 
The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice.
-- Linda Bowles		 
The cause of freedom is the cause of God.
-- William Lisle Bowles		 
This [audit] was made extremely difficult because [IRS] existing Systems were not designed to provide reliable financial information... on their operations.
-- Charles A. Bowsher		 
Constitutional provisions for the security of person and property should be liberally construed. It is the duty of the courts to be watchful of constitutional rights against any stealthy encroachments thereon.
-- Boyd v. U.S.		 
If all were to share alike, and all were to do alike, then all were on an equality throughout, and one was as good as another; and so, if it did not actually abolish those very relations which God himself has set among men, it did at least greatly diminish the mutual respect that is so important should be preserved amongst them. Let none argue that this is due to human failing, rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself....
-- William Bradford		 
The experience that was had in ... the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth ... was found to breed much confusion and discontent; and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit.... For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service objected that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children, without any recompense.... The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men, who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger ones, thought it some indignity and disrespect to them.
-- William Bradford		 
Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful. Better a thousand fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people.
-- Charles Bradlaugh		 
If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of human kind.
-- Charles Bradlaugh		 
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
-- General Omar Bradley		 
In a small Swiss city sits an international organization so obscure and secretive....Control of the institution, the Bank for International Settlements, lies with some of the world's most powerful and least visible men: the heads of 32 central banks, officials able to shift billions of dollars and alter the course of economies at the stroke of a pen.
-- Keith Bradsher		 
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
-- Anne Bradstreet		 
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
-- Anne Bradstreet		 
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
-- Anne Bradstreet		 
Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us have been totally disarmed.
-- Sarah Brady (False)		 
I honestly believe that sound commercialism is the best test of true value in art. People work hard for their money and if they won’t part with it for your product the chances are that your product hasn’t sufficient value. An artist or writer hasn’t any monopoly .... If the public response to his artistry is lacking, he’d do well to spend more time analyzing what’s the matter with his work, and less time figuring what’s the matter with the public.
-- Berton Braley		 
Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Most of the things worth doing in the world have been declared impossible before they were done.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen... If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
'Stare decisis' is usually the wise policy.... [b]ut where correction through legislative action is practically impossible, this Court has often overruled its earlier decisions...
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
[The founding fathers] conferred, as against the Government, the right to be left alone -- the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
They: The makers of the Constitution: conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 


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