Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"It is sometimes said that toleration
should be refused to the intolerant.
In practice this would destroy it...
The only remedy for dogmatism and lies
is toleration and the greatest possible
liberty of expression."

~ Joyce Cary  

"The power of the Right is principle, and the principle of the Left is power.
Understand this and you will understand the basis of modern politics."

~ J.T. Young  

"The village atheist has the right to be heard;
he has no right to be heeded. While he has a right
not to have his own children indoctrinated in what
he believes are false and foolish teachings,
he has no right to dictate what other children may be taught."

~ Patrick J. Buchanan  

"The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred,
feel themselves born to ride us."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"Many academicians and self-styled intellectuals, with a habitually arrogant and condescending attitude, treat the rest of the world with contempt. These so-called 'intelligentsia' congratulate themselves for, not only having high IQs and lots of education in their particular fields, but for having achieved the allegedly momentous insight that free-market capitalism and pure altruism are ultimately incompatible (duh). Yet they're still too damned stupid to realize, and too damned ignorant to acknowledge, that altruism is NOT the only moral code available to mankind. (It is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all). This stunted thinking has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion."

~ Rick Gaber  

"There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers."

~ William Damon  

"I doubt if the oppressed ever fight for freedom.
They fight for pride and for power -- power to oppress others.
The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors;
they want to retaliate."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free."

~ Hannah Arendt  

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

~ Viktor Frankl  

"It is clear that thought is not free
if the profession of certain opinions
make it impossible to earn a living."

~ Bertrand Russell  

"The ultimate decision about
what is accepted as right and wrong
will be made not by individual human wisdom
but by the disappearance of the groups
that have adhered to the 'wrong' beliefs."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"We owe to democracy, at least in part, the regime of discussion with which we live; we owe it to the principal modern liberties: those of thought, press and association. And the regime of free discussion is the only one which permits the ruling class to renew itself… which eliminates that class quasi-automatically when it no longer corresponds to the interests of the country."

~ Gaetano Mosca  

"The true measure of a man
is how he treats someone
who can do him absolutely no good."

~ Dr. Samuel Johnson  

"We must protect the freedoms of even those who hate us, and that we may find objectionable. If we fail in this task, we become victims of the precedents we create."

~ Judge Robert Doumar  

"Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin."

~ William O. Douglas