Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks."

~ Lin Yutang  

"Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it."

~ Mark Twain  

"I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't."

~ Mark Twain  

"Freedom of speech and freedom of action [is meaningless] without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt."

~ Bergan Evans  

"Censorship is advertising paid by the government."

~ Federico Fellini  

"Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control
is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely
is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people
gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing
the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles
to untangle the errors of the errant machine."

~ Victor Ferkiss  

"If you admit that to silence your opponent by force
is to win an intellectual argument,
then you admit the right to silence people by force."

~ Hans Eysenck  

"You thus have no rights at all over our freedom of thought, you princes; no jurisdiction over that which is true or false; no right to determine the objects of our inquiry or to set limits to it; no right to hinder us from communicating the results, whether they be true or false, to whomever or however we wish."

~ Johann Gottlieb Fichte  

"The function of the censor is to censor. He has a professional interest in finding things to suppress."

~ Thomas I. Emerson  

"I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say."

~ Calvin Coolidge  

"Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful.
Better a thousand fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech.
The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people."

~ Charles Bradlaugh  

"The liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man would venture to write on any subject, however, pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other. From minds thus subdued by the fear of punishment, there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason."

~ Thomas Erskine  

"The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land."

~ Clarence S. Darrow  

"The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every
clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority...
It is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people."

~ Frank I. Cobb  

"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them."

~ John Adams