Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power."

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  

"Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every  government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us."

~ P. J. O'Rourke  

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."

~ William E. Borah  

        "A politician will always tip off his true belief by stating the opposite at the beginning of the sentence. For maximum comprehension, do not start listening until the first clause is concluded. Begin instead at the word 'BUT' which begins the second, or active, clause. This is the way to tell a liberal from a conservative - before they tell you. Thus: 'I have always believed in a strong national defense, second to none, but...(a liberal, about to propose a $20 billion defense cut)."

~ Frank Mankiewicz  

"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

~ George Orwell  

"Politicians: Little Tin Gods on Wheels."

~ Rudyard Kipling  

"It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"When the same man, or set of men,
holds the sword and the purse,
there is an end of liberty."

~ George Mason  

"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangstersget control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

~ Lord Acton  

"The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation. It is the prolonged sacrifice of the rights of some persons at the bidding and for the satisfaction of other persons. The ruling idea of the politician - stated rather bluntly - is that those who are opposed to him exist for the purpose of being made to serve his ends, if he can get power enough in his hands to force these ends upon them."

~ Auberon Herbert  

"...there is no such entity as 'the public' - since the public is merely a number of individuals - the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others."

~ Ayn Rand  

"All governments are more or less combinations against the people...and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled...the power of government can only be kept within its constituted bounds by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected sentiment of the people."

~ Benjamin Franklin Bache  

"The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"Poltical campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration (thinking) man can normally muster."

~ James Harvey Robinson  

"No government knows any limits to its power except the endurance of the people."

~ Lysander Spooner