Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?"

~ William Lloyd Garrison  

"Wise politicians will be cautious about fettering the government
with restrictions that cannot be observed, because they know that
every break of the fundamental laws, though dictated by necessity,
impairs that sacred reverence which ought to be maintained in
the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country."

~ Alexander Hamilton  

"When a man assumes a public trust,
he should consider himself as public property."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth
and to publish and teach what one holds to be true.
This right implies also a duty; one must not conceal
any part of what one has recognized to be true."

~ Albert Einstein  

"He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it,
without asking who is for it or who is against it."

~ Henry George  

"You must study to be frank with the world:
frankness is the child of honesty and courage.
Say just what you mean to do on every occasion,
and take it for granted that you mean to do right."

~ Robert E. Lee  

"Nothing astonishes men so much as
common sense and plain dealing."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson  

"Every man who says frankly and fully
what he thinks is so far doing a public service.
We should be grateful to him for attacking
most unsparingly our most cherished opinions."

~ Sir Leslie Stephen  

"There is no inherent misdirection in holding unorthodox views.
Indeed, the autonomous individual, free from compulsive conformance
and unquestioned assumptions, is likely to be unorthodox...
They stimulate the climate of controversy without which
political democracy becomes an empty formalism."

~ Snell Putney  

"There can be no public or private virtue
unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth."

~ George Jacob Holyoake  

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President,
or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong,
is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable
to the American public."

~ Theodore Roosevelt  

"Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech,
all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions
are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery.
If the press is not free;
if speech is not independent and untrammeled;
if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear,
it makes no difference under what form of government you live,
you are a subject and not a citizen."

~ William E. Borah  

"I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top."

~ Frank Moore Colby  

"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right."

~ Isaac Asimov  

"Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday...
skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and
their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and
derision and targets of persecution for either side...
in the great ideological wars of our time."

~ Isaiah Berlin