Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"[When] Men are not allowed to think freely
about chemistry and biology,
why should they be allowed to think freely
about political philosophy?"

~ Auguste Comte  

"From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance."

~ Charles Tilly  

"Some informants spied on their neighbors because they actually believed the propaganda… Some denounced their enemies in order to settle personal grudges. Some were driven by their own fears to attempt to deflect attention away from themselves…Some were motivated by the sense of power turning in their neighbors gave them."

~ Kort E. Patterson  

"When we have begun to take charge of our lives, to own ourselves,
there is no longer any need to ask permission of someone."

~ George O'Neil  

"Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule."

~ Jefferson Davis  

"Your silence gives consent."

~ Plato  

"The United States was supposed to have a limited government because the founders knew government power attracts demagogues and despots as surely as horse manure attracts horseflies."

~ Rick Gaber  

"There are…certain freedoms that are like circuses.
Their very existence, so long as they are individual
and enjoyed chiefly individually as by spectators,
diverts men’s mind from the loss of other, more fundamental,
social and economic and political rights."

~ Robert Nisbet  

"The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity.
The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery."

~ Sir Winston Churchill  

"I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill."

~ Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi  

"From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual
if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression.
It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness
of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought...
Where the voice of the people is heard,
elite groups must insure their voice says the right things."

~ Noam Chomsky  

"There is no real wealth but the labor of man."

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley  

"One evening, when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the
tea urn, which was boiling merrily... My nurse would have taken me away
from the urn, but my mother said 'Let him touch it.' So I touched it --
and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty."

~ John Ruskin  

"Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning toward error."

~ Joseph Conrad  

"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."

~ Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.