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  

"The new puritans have been highly successful. All of the preconditions for new prohibitions on alcohol and tobacco are in place. ... Indeed, the future agenda of the federal government has already been established to outlaw alcohol and tobacco in the near future. ... If current trends persist, America will be moving toward stricter prohibitions, greater restrictions, and more centralized control over consumption. This represents an erosion of liberty at its most fundamental level."

~ Mark Thornton  

"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."

~ William E. Borah  

"To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth.
Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses,
rammed down our throats -- we know it not."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law.
Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old,
it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man!
Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself
in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on
his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery
than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

~ Frank Zappa  

"You can be up to your boobies in white satin,
with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles,
but you can still be working on a plantation."

~ Billie Holiday  

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves."

~ Harriet Tubman  

"Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize."

~ Sinclair Lewis  

"Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe,
and forbid men to say or write anything
against this or that opinion,
are often passed to gratify, or rather
to appease the anger of those
who cannot abide independent minds."

~ Baruch Spinoza  

"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  

"The more corrupt the state,
the more numerous the laws."

~ Cornelius Tacitus  

"There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.
One declares so many things to be a crime
that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

~ Ayn Rand  

"I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen."

~ Henry David Thoreau