Two wars necessitated vast curtailments of liberty, and we have grown, though grumblingly, accustomed to our chains. The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance. Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts.
As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good -- anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.
I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all. But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way.more C. S. Lewis quotes | A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.more C. S. Lewis quotes | | | | The Shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shephard as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as a destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.more Abraham Lincoln quotes | Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step over the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! -- All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a Thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. more Abraham Lincoln quotes | Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy hypocrisy.more Abraham Lincoln quotes | | We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.more Abraham Lincoln quotes | I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from ... the Declaration of Independence ... that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence ... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.more Abraham Lincoln quotes | The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.more Abraham Lincoln quotes | That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.more Abraham Lincoln quotes | | | In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs.more Walter Lippmann quotes | | The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.more Walter Lippmann quotes | Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right,
the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration.more Walter Lippmann quotes | In a democracy, the opposition is not only tolerated as constitutional, but must be maintained because it is indispensable.more Walter Lippmann quotes | I have no reason to suppose, that he, who would take away my liberty, would not, when he had me in his power, take away every thing else.more John Locke quotes | The Natural Liberty of Man is to be free from any Superior Power on Earth, and not to be under the Will or Legislative Authority of Man, but to have only the Law of Nature for his Rule.more John Locke quotes | | Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other.more John Locke quotes | Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society and
made by the legislative power vested in it and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man.more John Locke quotes | | Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall, freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin.more Henry Cabot Lodge quotes | Because law enforcement resources have been concentrated on the street drug trade in minority communities, drug arrests of minorities increased at 10 times the rate of increase for whites.more Los Angeles Times quotes | | And I honor the man who is willing to sink
half his present repute for the freedom to think,
and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.more James Russell Lowell quotes | The liberty of the people, he says, whom power restrains unduly, perishes through liberty.
[Lat., Libertas, inquit, populi quem regna coercent,
Libertate perit.]more Lucanus quotes | Within seven centuries, [the ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000.more F. J. Lucas quotes | Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only -- no matter how big its membership may be -- is no freedom at all. Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently.more Rosa Luxemburg quotes | | To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused.more Lord George Lyttleton quotes | | | | And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?more Thomas Babington Macaulay quotes | None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.more Thomas Babington Macaulay quotes | Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.more Thomas Babington Macaulay quotes | | | There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.more Thomas Babington Macaulay quotes | | The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well.
But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way
than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?more Thomas Babington Macaulay quotes | | Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.more J. Gresham Machen quotes | Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals.more Niccolo Machiavelli quotes | Where the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or of shame, should be allowed to prevail. But putting all other considerations aside, the only question should be: What course will save the life and liberty of the country?more Niccolo Machiavelli quotes |
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