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2006 July 07
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"Freedom of thought is the only guarantee
against an infection of people by mass myths,
which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues,
can be transformed into bloody dictatorships." |
"Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful." |
"Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic,
for authority can rarely survive in the face of doubt." |
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2006 July 06
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"Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear." |
"Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish." |
"The issues can be stated very briefly:
Who will be controlled?
Who will exercise control?
What type of control will be exercised?
Most important of all, toward what end or purpose,
or in the pursuit of what value, will control be exercised?" |
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2006 July 05
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"It is dangerous to be right in matters
on which the established authorities are wrong." |
"All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification." |
"Reasonable argument is impossible
when authority becomes the arbiter." |
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2006 July 04
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"If the author of the Declaration of Independence were to utter such a sentiment today, the Post Office Department could exclude him from the mail, grand juries could indict him for sedition and criminal syndicalism, legislative committees could seize his private papers ... and United States Senators would be clamoring for his deportation that he ... should be sent back to live with the rest of the terrorists." |
"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground:
That 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution,
nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the
people' (10th Amendment). To take a single step beyond the boundaries
thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take
possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to any
definition." |
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2006 July 03
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"No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you
can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more
pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire
to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of
debate must be regarded as a sacred right." |
"The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society." |
"A new fascism promises security from the terror of crime.
All that is required is that we take away the criminals’ rights
-- which, of course, are our own.
Out of our desperation and fear we begin to feel
a sense of security from the new totalitarian state." |
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