Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction.
Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."

~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton  

"A government resting on the minority is an aristocracy, not a republic,
and could not be safe with a numerical and physical force against it,
without a standing army, an enslaved press and a disarmed populace."

~ James Madison  

"Never trust governments absolutely
and always do what you can to prevent
them from doing too much harm."

~ John Arthur Passmore  

"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties
to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men,
disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman
called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men."

~ Gerald W. Johnson  

"We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of
the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should
infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections."

~ John Adams  

"I guess truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that can happen to you."

~ Will Rogers  

"I could think of no worse example for nations abroad, who for the first
time were trying to put free electoral procedures into effect, than that
of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential
election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen
by thievery at the ballot box."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty
of discussing the propriety of public measures and political
opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means
the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another,
I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it,
whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law and
shall chearfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others
for the privilege of not being abused myself."

~ Benjamin Franklin  

"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  

"Whoever controls the media,
controls the mind."

~ Jim Morrison  

"No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt
of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand [television]."

~ Fred W. Friendly  

"The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."

~ George Orwell  

"The Press was protected so that it could bare the secrets
of the government and inform the people. Only a free and
unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in
government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a
free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government
from deceiving the people."

~ Justice Hugo L. Black