Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"I have never met a more dedicated bunch of people than I did working in the union, at every level. The work is difficult and demanding, and very few people would do it if they didn’t believe in its righteousness. However, the conviction that you know what’s best insulates you against reflecting morally on your own actions and it teaches you to begin assessing morality in terms of either the ends justifying the means, or even worse, of mere good intention justifying those means."

~ Ben Johnson  

"It is a general popular error to suppose
the loudest complainers for the public
to be the most anxious for its welfare."

~ Edmund Burke  

"All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even a small fraction of the topics that we come across."

~ Julian Simon  

"Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws. He is obliged, consequently, to contribute his share to the expense of this protection; and to give his personal service, or an equivalent, when necessary. But no part of the property of any individual can, with justice, be taken from him, or applied to public uses, without his own consent, or that of the representative body of the people. In fine, the people of this commonwealth are not controllable by any other laws than those to which their constitutional representative body have given their consent."

~ John Adams  

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty.
Suspect every one who approaches that jewel.
Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force.
Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined....
O sir, we  should have fine times, indeed, if to punish tyrants,
it were only sufficient to assemble the people!"

~ Patrick Henry  

"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false."

~ Paul Bede Johnson  

"It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. "

~ H. L. Mencken  

"All men by nature are equal in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man; being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."

~ John Locke  

"Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively
to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?"

~ Justice William O. Douglas  

"Nothing can be more readily disproved than the old saw,
"You can't keep a good man down." Most human societies
have been beautifully organized to keep good men down."

~ John W. Gardner  

"It is not the function of the government
to keep the citizen from falling into error;
it is the function of the citizen to keep
the government from falling into error."

~ Justice Robert H. Jackson  

"Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
From none but self expect applause:
He noblest lives and noblest dies
Who makes and keeps his self-made laws."

~ Sir Richard Francis Burton  

"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests.  The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism."

~ Ayn Rand  

"Those who believe themselves to be masters of all they survey are mistaken. There is no such thing as absolute power and the delusion that one is in possession of such power constitutes absolute corruption. This delusion leads, resolutely, to the downfall of its adherents."

~ Daniel Pouzzner  

"People unfit for freedom -- who cannot do much with it -- are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self."

~ Eric Hoffer