| I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.more H. L. Mencken quotes | Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.more John Stuart Mill quotes | The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous.more Richard Mitchell quotes | [T]he income tax is incompatible with a free society. The IRS routinely intrudes on our basic civil liberties and privacy rights -- and its intrusions are getting worse all the time. I want an America where it is no longer the government's business how much money you make and what you do with it.more Stephen Moore quotes | A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face... one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy.more Charles Langbridge Morgan quotes | The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance -- a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms -- A Nation of Finger Pointers.more Lance Morrow quotes | 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 ...more George Orwell quotes | 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.more George Orwell quotes | The poorest man may in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.more William Pitt quotes | | If you permit the audio recordings, they'll be a lot more eavesdropping. ... There's going to be a lot of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers. ... Yes, it's a bad thing. There is such a thing as privacy.more Judge Richard Allen Posner quotes | It will take America fifteen years of steady taking care of our own business and letting everybody else's alone, to get us back to where everybody speaks to us again.more Will Rogers quotes | The earth becomes more crowded, and our dependence upon our neighbours becomes more intimate. In these circumstances life cannot remain tolerable unless we learn to let each other alone in all matters that are not of immediate and obvious concern to the community. We must learn to respect each other's privacy, and not to impose our moral standards upon each other. The Puritan imagines that his moral standard is the moral standard; he does not realize that other ages and other countries, and even other groups in his own country, have moral standards different from his, to which they have as good a right as he has to his. Unfortunately, the love of power which is the natural outcome of Puritan self-denial makes the Puritan more executive than other people, and makes it difficult for others to resist him. Let us hope that a broader education and a wider knowledge of mankind may gradually weaken the ardour of our too virtuous masters.more Bertrand Russell quotes | There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.more Justice Antonin Scalia quotes | The Declaration of Independence, however, is not a legal prescription conferring powers upon the courts; and the Constitution's refusal to "deny or disparage" other rights is far removed from affirming any one of them, and even farther removed from authorizing judges to identify what they might be, and to enforce the judges' list against laws duly enacted by the people. more Justice Antonin Scalia quotes | Americans find it intolerable that one constitutional right should have to be surrendered in order to assert another. America is the land of the free and home of the brave -- we don't need a Patriot Act, because we are already patriots. We know freedom means responsibility, but I am not sure Congress and its domestic enforcement agencies do. More often than not, new security measures enacted by the government have resulted in more violations of the citizenry than terrorists have ever done. The terrorists want us to be afraid -- well, we are not afraid. Stop wasting dollars on this program -- it is not good for America. To give up essential liberty for a little security provides neither. The right to be left alone from government intrusion is the beginning of all freedoms.more Eric Schaub quotes | | | A free society can exist only when public spirit is balanced by an equal inclination of men to mind their own business.more Edward A. Shils quotes | Here in America, government began as a tool to assure freedom. It gradually turned into a hideously expensive political toy designed to redistribute your wealth and control most aspects of your business and private life.more Mark Skousen quotes | Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.more Lillian Smith quotes | Saying it’s okay for the government to spy on you because you’re innocent and you have “nothing to hide”... Is like saying it’s okay for the government to censor free speech because you have “nothing to say.” more Edward Snowden quotes | Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which one man harms the person or property of another. Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property. In vices, the very essence of crime—that is, the design to injure the person or property of another—is wanting. It is a maxim of the law that there can be no crime without criminal intent; that is, without the intent to invade the person or property of another. But no one ever practices a vice with any such criminal intent. He practices his vice for his own happiness solely, and not from any malice toward others. Unless this clear distinction between vices and crimes be made and recognized by the laws, there can be on earth no such thing as individual right, liberty, or property, and the corresponding coequal rights of another man to the control of his own person and property.more Lysander Spooner quotes | | | From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance.more Charles Tilly quotes | The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.more Mark Twain quotes | | ... bank records are not the depositor's private papers and having given the information to the bank, the depositor has no legitimate expectation of continued privacy... Records of an individual's accounts with banks are not the individual's private papers protected against compulsory production by the 4th Amendment, but instead are the business records of the banks.more United States Supreme Court quotes | Democracy, n.: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic... negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, [chaos].more U. S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25 quotes | The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable.more U. S. Privacy Study Commission quotes | The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.more U.S. Constitution quotes | The first duty of government is to protect the citizen from assault. Unless it does this, all the civil rights and civil liberties in the world aren't worth a dime.more Richard A. Viguerie quotes | I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, 'That which is everybody's business is nobody's business'.more Izaak Walton quotes | If the major opportunities for future growth of government lie in the area of conventional taxation, are there any defenses available to the citizenry? ... Perhaps the most fruitful advice comes in two parts. The first piece of advice is to avoid war and the rumor of war: this is history's greatest boon to the tax man. ... The second piece of advice is to seek ways of inhibiting government's ability conveniently to increase its collections. Possibly the very increase in that ability that is in prospect can be turned to account by a constitutional provision which forbade the income tax, and perhaps even the storage of information regarding individual incomes by third parties, including government.more Benjamin Ward quotes | But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.more Alan Watts quotes | Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have.more Daniel Webster quotes | |
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