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Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
-- Bob Wells		 
Moral indignation: jealousy with a halo.
-- H. G. Wells		 
Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.
-- H. G. Wells		 
The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate -- shall I say third-rate? -- mind, Karl Marx.
-- H. G. Wells		 
... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.
-- H. G. Wells		 
... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.
-- H. G. Wells		 
The Communists could succeed if we ever let ourselves be lulled into thinking that they are no longer dangerous to us externally and internally. They would be victorious if we were ever duped by their own nationals or by foolish Americans -- if we were ever duped into believing that they are not aggressive, atheist socialist imperialists. They have proved they never sleep. They have never permanently retreated, and what seems at a particular time to be a cessation of their forward movement or a change in their designs is nothing more than a tactical maneuver on another front.
-- Kenneth D. Wells		 
When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.
-- Brian S. Wesbury		 
Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.
-- John Wesley		 
The first of the dreams that [my parents] instilled in me was individual responsibility and accountability. They taught me that in life you have consequences to each and every decision that you make, and when you try to shy away from those decisions, when you try to shy away from those consequences then someone will come in and allow you to be seen as a victim, and when you become seen as a victim, it’s a spiraling slope downward and downward. Before the next thing you know, you become dependent upon something and right here in the United States of America this is one of the things that we combat against because too many Americans are being castigated as victims. Too many Americans are not being individually responsible and accountable. Too many Americans are becoming dependent upon government and therefore government continues to grow. My parents and their dream was to have a son that was not a victim, but a son that was a victor, and that enables me to stand here before you today.
-- Col. Allen West		 
When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before.
-- Mae West		 
I believe in censorship. After all, I made a fortune out of it.
-- Mae West		 
But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.
-- Rebecca West		 
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
-- Rebecca West		 
There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.
-- Rebecca West		 
A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and state, and for lawful hunting and recreational use.
-- West Virginia Constitution		 
Freedom of communication means, clearly and unquestionably, freedom to speak, debate, and write in privacy; to share confidence with intimates and confidants, and to prepare positions in groups and institutions for presentation to the public at a later point.
-- Alan Westin		 
The denial or revocation of a parenting license would be expected to be a painful experience, particularly for mothers. The overall importance of protecting innocent children from incompetent parenting justifies the inconvenience to a few parents and the inevitable imperfections of a licensing system.
-- Jack C. Westman		 
Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
-- General William Westmoreland		 
There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick.
-- Grover Whalen		 
We are only so free that others may be free as well as we.
-- Benjamin Whichcote		 
While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal, substances.
-- Justice Byron R. White		 
The last great delusion is soon to open before us. Antichrist is to perform his marvelous works in our sight. So closely will the counterfeit resemble the true that it will be impossible to distinguish between them except by the Holy Scriptures.
-- Ellen G. White		 
It is labor that keeps the strong man strong. And spiritual labor, toil and burden-bearing, is what will give strength to the church of Christ.
-- Ellen G. White		 
I believe... that security declines as security machinery expands.
-- E. B. White		 
Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men.
-- E. B. White		 
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
-- E. B. White		 
Commuter - one who spends his life In riding to and from his wife; A man who shaves and takes a train, And then rides back to shave again.
-- E. B. White		 
The banks do create money. They have been doing it for a long time, but they didn't realise it, and they did not admit it. Very few did. You will find it in all sorts of documents, financial textbooks, etc. But in the intervening years, and we must be perfectly frank about these things, there has been a development of thought, until today I doubt very much whether you would get many prominent bankers to attempt to deny that banks create it.
-- H. W. White		 
History is a means of access to ourselves.
-- Lynn White, Jr.		 
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment.
-- T. H. White		 
You can have no wise laws nor free enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people -- and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive.
-- William Allen White		 
Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
-- William Allen White		 
You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress, and I reply with the sad truth that only in time of stress is freedom of utterance in danger… Only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed it is most vital to justice.
-- William Allen White		 
There but for the grace of God go I.
-- Rev. George Whitefield		 
Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.
-- Alfred North Whitehead		 
The creation of the world -- said Plato -- is the victory of persuasion over force... Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals... Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of these two forms: force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force.
-- Alfred North Whitehead		 
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
-- Alfred North Whitehead		 
Whatever the issue might be, whether it’s mass surveillance, no-knock raids, or the right to freely express one’s views about the government, we’ve moved into a new age in which the rights of the citizenry are being treated as a secondary concern by the White House, Congress, the courts and their vast holding of employees, including law enforcement officials.
-- John W. Whitehead		 
In recent years we have witnessed numerous marches on Washington in which one group or another has demanded new “rights.” Frequently, such rights have not meant freedom from state control, but rather entitlement to state action, protection, or subsidy. In the process of yielding to the “will of the people” and creating new rights, the state invariably enlarges itself and its bureaucracy. Each new right seems to demand a new agency to guarantee it, administer it, or deliver it.
-- John W. Whitehead		 
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
-- Walt Whitman		 
Freedom's soil hath only place For a free and fearless race!
-- John Greenleaf Whittier		 
The nations lift their right hands up and swear Their oath of freedom.
-- John Greenleaf Whittier		 
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been!
-- John Greenleaf Whittier		 
The slave will be free. Democracy in America will yet be a glorious reality; and when the top-stone of that temple of freedom which our fathers left unfinished shall be brought forth with shoutings and cries of grace unto it, when our now drooping Liberty lifts up her head and prospers, happy will he be who can say, with John Milton, "Among those who have something more than wished her welfare, I, too, have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and my heirs."
-- John Greenleaf Whittier		 
You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common, they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable, if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.
-- Doctor Who		 
If the true freedom of the press is to decide for itself what to publish and when to publish it, the true responsibility of the press must be to assert and defend that freedom… What the press in America needs is less inhibition, not more restraint.
-- Tom Wicker		 
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
-- Norbert Wiener		 
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
-- Elie Wiesel		 
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
-- Elie Wiesel		 
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
-- Elie Wiesel		 
Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.
-- Albert Edward Wiggin		 
As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
All authority is quite degrading.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. ... One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great, individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist ...
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
He hasn't one redeeming vice.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress had been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Lawyers have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
[T]hough of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Progressives understand that their program for a government-centered society becomes more plausible the more people believe that work -- individual striving -- is unavailing. Government grows as fatalism grows, and fatalism grows as progressivism inculcates in people the demoralizing -- make that de-moralizing -- belief that they are victims of circumstances.
-- George Will		 
It has been well said that really up-to-date liberals do not care what people do, as long as it is compulsory.
-- George Will		 
The cultivation -- even celebration -- of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.
-- George Will		 
Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.
-- George Will		 
The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of America is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.
-- George Will		 
The Framers of the First Amendment were not concerned with preventing government from abridging their freedom to speak about crops and cockfighting, or with protecting the expressive activity of topless dancers, which of late has found some shelter under the First Amendment. Rather, the Framers cherished unabridged freedom of political communication.
-- George Will		 
The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality.   People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government.
-- George Will		 
There is sufficient evidence that a number of societies, of the Illuminati, have been established in this land of Gospel light and civil liberty, which were first organized from the grand society, in France. They are doubtless secretly striving to undermine all our ancient institutions, civil and sacred. These societies are closely leagued with those of the same Order, in Europe; they have all the same object in view. The enemies of all order are seeking our ruin. Should infidelity generally prevail, our independence would fall of course. Our republican government would be annihilated.
-- Joseph Willard		 
If you mind your own business, you won't be minding mine.
-- Hank Williams		 
I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount of blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals. Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don’t fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America. Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom.
-- Juan Williams		 
God requireth not a uniformity of religion.
-- Roger Williams		 
We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.
-- Tad Williams		 
We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.
-- Tad Williams		 
The mistake you make is in trying to figure it out.
-- Tenessee Williams		 
Communism and socialism is [sic] seductive. It promises us that people will contribute according to ability and receive according to needs. Everybody is equal. Everybody has a right to decent housing, decent food and affordable medical care. History should have taught us that when we hear people talk this stuff -- watch out!
-- Walter E. Williams		 
The bottom line is that we've become a nation of thieves, a value rejected by our founders. James Madison, the father of our Constitution, was horrified when Congress appropriated $15,000 to help French refugees. He said, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." Tragically, today's Americans would run Madison out of town on a rail.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation’s tyrants and their useful idiots. ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
What’s “just” has been debated for centuries, but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then, tell me how much of what I earn “belongs” to you -- and why?
-- Walter E. Williams		 
All we have to do now is to inform the public that the payment of social security taxes is voluntary and watch the mass exodus.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Liberalism is a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs. Liberalism undermines the spirit of self-help and individual responsibility. For liberals in academia, the fact that black college students earn lower grades and have a higher dropout rate than any group besides reservation Indians means that blacks remain stymied and victimized by white racism. Thus, their push for affirmative action and other race-based programs is to assuage their guilt and shame for America’s past by having people around with black skin color. The heck with the human being inside that skin.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Conservatives and liberals are kindred spirits as far as government spending is concerned. ... Since government has no resources of its own, and since there’s no Tooth Fairy handing Congress the funds for the programs it enacts, we are forced to recognize that government spending is no less than the confiscation of one person’s property to give it to another to whom it does not belong -- in effect, legalized theft.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist urges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'.
-- Walter E. Williams		 


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