Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live,
it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."

~ Oscar Wilde  

"There is no inherent misdirection in holding unorthodox views.
Indeed, the autonomous individual, free from compulsive conformance
and unquestioned assumptions, is likely to be unorthodox...
They stimulate the climate of controversy without which
political democracy becomes an empty formalism."

~ Snell Putney  

"I may die a beggar, but with the Grace of God, I will not die a slave.
I will not be filed, stamped, briefed, debriefed, or numbered...
My life is my own."

~ The Prisoner  

"Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue..."

~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.  

"No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws,
whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being..."

~ Benjamin Constant  

"If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. "

~ Henry David Thoreau  

"If one doesn't know his mistakes, he won't want to correct them."

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca  

"You must study to be frank with the world:
frankness is the child of honesty and courage.
Say just what you mean to do on every occasion,
and take it for granted that you mean to do right."

~ Robert E. Lee  

"Sit down before fact as a little child,
be prepared to give up every preconceived notion,
follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads,
or you will learn nothing."

~ Thomas Henry Huxley  

"A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon
because those who coerce him do so
in the belief that he will be benefited."

~ Herbert Spencer  

"No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law.
Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old,
it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"Do not separate text from historical background.
If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution,
which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government."

~ James Madison  

"A man does what he must --
in spite of personal consequences,
in spite of obstacles and dangers --
and this is the basis of all human morality."

~ John F. Kennedy  

"It is a great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all it's good dispositions."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully,
rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie."

~ Charles Edward Montague