Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'.
It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist
sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men
striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification
of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the
greatest achievement that demagoguery attains."

~ Herbert Hoover  

"The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism."

~ Justice William J. Brennan  

"It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way."

~ Laurence Tribe  

"No passion so effectually robs the mind
of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

~ Edmund Burke  

"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

~ Hermann Goering  

"Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists."

~ George W. Bush  

"All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level,
that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will
understand it... Through clever and constant application of propaganda,
people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way
around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."

~ Adolf Hitler  

"We can't be so fixated on our desire
to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans..."

~ Bill Clinton  

"The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded."

~ Vance Packard  

"Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions?
Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the
suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that
suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties
might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was
shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases
wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that
operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost
prepared to live under its constant suspension."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been
the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage
of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience."

~ Albert Camus  

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully
as when they do it from religious conviction."

~ Blaise Pascal  

"The war made possible for us the solution
of a whole series of problems that
could never have been solved in normal times."

~ Joseph Paul Goebbels  

"The worst thing that can happen to a good cause
is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended."

~ Frederic Bastiat