Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities."

~ Alan Bloom  

"Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none."

~ Edmund Burke  

"If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment,
it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea
simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable."

~ Justice William J. Brennan  

"All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question
and in consequence, to upset existing convictions;
that is precisely its purpose and its justification."

~ Judge Learned Hand  

"There is an almost universal tendency,
perhaps an inborn tendency,
to suspect the good faith of a man
who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions...
It obviously endangers the freedom
and the objectivity of our discussion
if we attack a person instead of attacking
an opinion or, more precisely, a theory."

~ Sir Karl Popper  

"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual
human is the most valuable thing in all the world. And this I would
fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes,
undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or
government which limits or destroys the individual."

~ John Steinbeck  

"...there is no such entity as 'the public' - since the public is merely a number of individuals - the idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others."

~ Ayn Rand  

"In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing."

~ Charles-Louis de Secondat  

"They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world
the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man.
That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith."

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower  

"Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense."

~ Mark Twain  

"The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights... This implies a belief in the equality of man in one sense; in their inequality in another."

~ Milton Friedman  

"Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. It's so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world."

~ Ronald Reagan  

"Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience
does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism."

~ Herman Hesse  

"Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose
his moral standards upon 'B',
'A' is most likely a scoundrel."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities."

~ John Stuart Mill