Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

~ Frank Zappa  

"The average man is a conformist,
accepting miseries and disasters
with the stoicism of a cow
standing in the rain."

~ Colin Wilson  

"You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common, they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable, if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."

~ Doctor Who  

"Most of the major ills of the world
have been caused by well-meaning people
who ignored the principle of individual freedom,
except as applied to themselves,
and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal
to improve the lot of mankind."

~ Henry Grady Weaver  

"You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world."

~ Octave Mirbeau  

"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress
requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things."

~ Russell Baker  

"The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?"

~ C. S. Lewis  

"Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind to rule, springing out of, and necessarily to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is the same in all cases -- less government."

~ Herbert Spencer  

"Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant. The further society "progresses," the grander the scale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries."

~ M. Robin D'Antan  

"Does it not seem a vast waste of valuable human material that the pioneers of thought, those who by their genius dare to clear unknown paths in the arts and sciences and in government, should have to conform to the dictates of that non-creative, slow-moving mass, the majority? An appeal to the majority is a resort to force and not an appeal to intelligence; the majority is always ignorant, and by increasing the majority we multiply ignorance. The majority is incapable of initiative, its attitude being one of opposition toward everything that is new. If it had been left to the majority, the world would never have had the steamboat, the railroad, the telegraph, or any of the conveniences of modern life."

~ Charles T. Sprading  

"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

~ Frederick Douglass  

"Collective judgment of new ideas is so often wrong that it is arguable that progress depends on individuals being free to back their own judgment despite collective disapproval."

~ Sir William Arthur Lewis  

"Truth always originates in a minority of one,
and every custom begins as a broken precedent."

~ Nancy Astor  

"Such being the happiness of the times, that you may think as you wish, and speak as you think.

[Lat., Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet.]"

~ Cornelius Tacitus  

"Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program."

~ Jon Rappoport