Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate."

~ Isaiah Berlin  

"Men must have the right of choice,
even to choose wrong,
if he shall ever learn to choose right."

~ Josiah C. Wedgwood  

"When it is a duty to worship the sun
it is pretty sure to be a crime
to examine the laws of heat."

~ John Viscount Morley  

"Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs,
our policy against narcotics -- like any public policy --
comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings
are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties."

~ Joel Miller  

"Political correctness is really a subjective list
put together by the few to rule the many --
a list of things one must think, say, or do.
It affronts the right of the individual
to establish his or her own beliefs."

~ Mark Berley  

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."

~ Plato  

"Vices are not crimes."

~ Lysander Spooner  

"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is
assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question.
It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other,
but it is "not done"... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy
finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely
unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in
the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."

~ George Orwell  

"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."

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay  

"Vices are their own punishment."

~ Aesop  

"In Europe, when tobacco was first introduced,
it was immediately banned. In Turkey, if you
got caught with tobacco, you had your nose slit.
China and Russia imposed the death penalty
for possession of tobacco."

~ Andrew Weil, MD  

"Whatever the immediate gains and losses,
the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression
are always greater than the dangers
to the safety resulting from political freedom.
Suppression is always foolish."

~ Neil A. McDonald  

"I never hurt nobody but myself
and that's nobody's business but my own."

~ Billie Holiday  

"Prohibition goes beyond
the bounds of reason
in that it attempts to control
a man's appetite by legislation,
and makes a crime out of things
that are not crimes."

~ Abraham Lincoln (Questionable)  

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised
over any member of a civilized community, against his will,
is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral,
is not sufficient warrant."

~ John Stuart Mill