Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State ...
Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual;
Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual."

~ Benito Mussolini  

~ Benjamin Franklin  

"The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty."

~ Fisher Ames  

"You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out,
and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out."

~ Andrew Jackson  

"Madison, agreeing with the journal of the convention,
records that the grant of power to emit bills of credit
was refused by a majority of more than four to one.
The evidence is perfect; no power to emit paper money
was granted to the legislature of the United States."

~ George Bancroft  

"(The Great Depression resulting from the Stock Market crash) was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence....The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as rulers of us all."

~ Louis McFadden  

"There are in fact four very significant stumblingblocks in the way
of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned,
and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely,
the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom,
the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance
while making a display of our apparent knowledge."

~ Roger Bacon  

"Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities."

~ Alan Bloom  

"However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise.
There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious
beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than
Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme
being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's
behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are
growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with
wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following
their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups
on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a
loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the
political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if
I want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.'
Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to
claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even
more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every
religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my
vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today:
I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their
moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism.' "

~ Barry Goldwater  

"A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man;
a debt he proposes to pay off with your money."

~ G. Gordon Liddy  

"Those who call themselves 'liberals' today are asking for policies which are precisely the opposite of those policies which the liberals of the nineteenth century advocated in their liberal programs. The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial -- that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions."

~ Ludwig von Mises  

"If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals -- if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is."

~ Ronald Reagan  

"A universal peace, it is to be feared, is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts."

~ James Madison  

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and
Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes.
The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being
corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his
revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his
tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who
rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins.
He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new
blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of
immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or
mutual check, in our Constitution."

~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton  

"Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be confused."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek