Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.more Alan Dershowitz quotes |
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To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in.more Mark Van Doren quotes |
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The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and…the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression and obedience.more Justice William O. Douglas quotes |
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Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged.more William O. Douglas quotes |
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.more William O. Douglas quotes |
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.more William O. Douglas quotes |
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.more Frederick Douglass quotes |
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Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.more Will Durant quotes |
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Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.more Albert Einstein quotes |
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.more Albert Einstein quotes |
They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith.more Dwight D. Eisenhower quotes |
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Every man – in the development of his own personality – has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential nature.more Thomas I. Emerson quotes |
The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being.more Thomas I. Emerson quotes |
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The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.more Bergan Evans quotes |
If a blending of individualism and of cooperative participation is a prerequisite to a democratic solution of the problems of a society of free men, it must also be noted that an atmosphere of freedom is required if these problems are to be met constructively and as they arise.more Marshall Field quotes |
We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.more Abraham Flexner quotes |
The last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.more Viktor Frankl quotes |
The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights…This implies a belief in the equality of man in one sense; in their inequality in another.more Milton Friedman quotes |
The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an “individual,” existing apart from his group.more Erich Fromm quotes |
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.more Robert Frost quotes |
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The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear.more Helen H. Gardner quotes |
Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw, "You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down.more John W. Gardner quotes |
Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed.more Josiah William Gitt quotes |
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Lose this day loitering
'Twill be the same old story,
Tomorrow and the next,
Even more dilatory.
Whatever you would do,
Or dream of doing, begin it!
Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it.
Begin it now.more Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quotes |
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If what is best in mankind, and what its progress depends on, manifests itself primarily in the individual and only secondarily in the mass, then our objectives should be to maintain such freedom as allows the individual to think and speak for himself.more Louis J. Halle quotes |
All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.more Judge Learned Hand quotes |
Vitality springs from diversity -- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces-alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations.more B. H. Liddell Hart quotes |
A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends.more Caryl Parker Haskins quotes |
A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.more Fredrich August von Hayek quotes |
It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today.more Fredrich August von Hayek quotes |
The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are.more Fredrich August von Hayek quotes |
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.more Fredrich August von Hayek quotes |
...the case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend.more Fredrich August von Hayek quotes |
Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster.more William Randolph Hearst quotes |
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