Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Yes; truth blends well with untruth.
It is one of the maladies of our age, a sign of sheer nervousness,
to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters,
to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake."

~ Norman Douglas  

"Without criticism and reliable and intelligent reporting, the government cannot govern."

~ Walter Lippmann  

"What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?"

~ William Winwood Reade  

"Government has no other end than the preservation of property."

~ John Locke  

"Those who call themselves 'liberals' today are asking for policies which are precisely the opposite of those policies which the liberals of the nineteenth century advocated in their liberal programs. The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial -- that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions."

~ Ludwig von Mises  

"Travel is lethal to prejudice."

~ Mark Twain  

"What censorship accomplishes, creating an unreal and hypocritical mythology, fomenting an attraction for forbidden fruit, inhibiting the creative minds among us and fostering an illicit trade. Above all, it curtails the right of the individual, be he creator or consumer, to satisfy his intellect and his interest without harm. In our law-rooted society, we are not the keeper of our brother’s morals -- only of his rights."

~ Judith Crist  

"In our country are evangelists and
zealots of many different political,
economic and religious persuasions
whose fanatical conviction is that
all thought is divinely classified
into two kinds -- that which is
their own and that which is false
and dangerous."

~ Justice Robert H. Jackson  

"Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice;
nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."

~ Lord Acton  

"Moral indignation: jealousy with a halo."

~ H. G. Wells  

"The most efficacious method
of dealing with deviancy
is to ignore,
to the furthest point
of our tolerance,
those items
which we find offensive."

~ Ilbert Geis  

"An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained
intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve
that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and
a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in
time a people as base as itself."

~ Joseph Pulitzer  

"I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go,
but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point
where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I
don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've
got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't
got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a
right to be a nuisance to his neighbors."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition."

~ James Q. Wilson  

"Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?"

~ Jimmy Durante