Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order,
stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death,
I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs
(which alas! is all too inadequate)."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble
and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!"

~ Samuel Adams  

"The right is general. It may be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. The militia, as has been explained elsewhere, consists of those persons who, under the law, are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. ... [I]f the right were limited to those enrolled, the purpose of the guarantee might be defeated altogether by the action or the neglect to act of the government it was meant to hold in check. The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for that purpose."

~ Thomas Cooley  

"Open discussion of many major public questions
has for some time now been taboo.
We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists,
misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.
As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated."

~ Saul Bellow  

"If language is not correct,
then what is said is not what is meant;
if what is said is not what is meant,
then what must be done remains undone;
if this remains undone,
morals and art will deteriorate;
if justice goes astray,
the people will stand about in helpless confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
This matters above everything."

~ Confucius  

"The nature of the encroachment upon American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer; it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole of society."

~ John Adams  

"In the process of helping some (perhaps most)
people to more utility and justice,
the state imposes on civil society
a system of interdictions and commands."

~ Anthony de Jasay  

"A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

~ James Madison  

"As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them."

~ Tench Coxe  

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless,
and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful."

~ Dr. Samuel Johnson  

"Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words;
and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words.
It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word."

~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton  

"A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences."

~ Jacques Maritain  

"We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which, practically speaking, may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated."

~ John Marshall Harlan II  

"Often, the surest way to convey information is to tell the strict truth."

~ Mark Twain  

"Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it."

~ Tom Robbins