Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good."

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  

"Let us remind ourselves that in the Soviet Union the road to medical-care hell was paved with the same good intentions. ... At the end of the 20th century, Russia was infamous for having one of the worst health-care systems in the world."

~ Anna Ebeling  

"What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires -- desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."

~ Bertrand Russell  

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country
is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely,
one who likes his country more than the rest of us,
and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us
when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime;
he is a good citizen driven to despair.

~ H. L. Mencken  

"Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them -- and then, the opportunity to choose."

~ C. Wright Mills  

"Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"[W]hat suffers in the atmosphere of immediacy is analysis. What suffers in this search for speed is depth. The media in the wealthy world are becoming increasingly simplistic, superficial, and celebrity-focused."

~ Laurie Garrett  

"The Left/Right scale is a misleading way of comparing political systems. It doesn't measure anything."

~ Marshall Fritz  

"I operate under the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. ...
It operates with the objective to simplify and exaggerate,
which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists."

~ Dr. Michael Crichton  

"... political reporters love to write about politics as if they are merely disinterested observers of political events and the public's perceptions of them, when in fact they play a very key role in shaping those events and perceptions."

~ Greg Sargent  

"The press is hostile to the idea of liberty.
Most people in the press are for big government.
Most people think that the solution to anything,
whether it's health care problems, education,
whatever it is -- it's got to be more government."

~ Harry Browne  

"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

~ Mark Twain  

"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.”"

~ Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  

"O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!"

~ Sir Walter Scott