To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.more Milton Friedman quotes |
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.more Erich Fromm quotes |
To expose a 4.2 Trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business.more Buckminster Fuller quotes |
19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society.more Rocco Galati quotes |
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What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. ...Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.more Elbridge Gerry quotes |
Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.more A. Bartlett Giamatti quotes |
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And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse -- the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist.more Barry Goldwater quotes |
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Secret societies have existed among all peoples, savage and civilized, since the beginning of recorded history...It is beyond question that the secret societies of all ages have exercised a considerable degree of political influence...more Manley P. Hall quotes |
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Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.more Sydney J. Harris quotes |
In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.more B. H. Liddell Hart quotes |
The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.more B. H. Liddell Hart quotes |
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Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand.more Friedrich August von Hayek quotes |
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I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.more Friedrich August von Hayek quotes |
The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs.more Friedrich August von Hayek quotes |
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Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.more Robert A. Heinlein quotes |
Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit.
This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security.more Frank Herbert quotes |
The possession of power over others is inherently destructive both to the possessor of the power and to those over whom it is exercised.more George D. Herron quotes |
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.more Adolf Hitler quotes |
It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.more Eric Hoffer quotes |
The president of the American Bar Association begins a nationwide tour, giving speeches on the dangers of Treaty Law: 'The doctrine that the treaty power is unlimited and omnipotent and may be used to OVERRIDE the Constitution and the Bill of Rights...is a doctrine of recent origin and largely derived from Missouri v. Holland.'more Frank E. Holman quotes |
Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.more Jack Hugh quotes |
Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.more Jack Hugh quotes |
The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our history abundantly attest.more Justice Charles Evans Hughes quotes |
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That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.more Aldous Huxley quotes |
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.more Thomas Henry Huxley quotes |
History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.more Julian Jaynes quotes |
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I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions?
Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the
suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that
suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties
might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was
shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases
wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that
operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost
prepared to live under its constant suspension.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
Our legislators are not sufficiently appraised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having the right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third [party]. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions; and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
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I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.more Thomas Jefferson quotes |
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.more Paul Bede Johnson quotes |
Throughout history, the attachment of even the humblest people to their freedom…has come as an unpleasant shock to condescending ideologues.more Paul Bede Johnson quotes |
