Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thought under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."

~ Michel de Montaigne  

"Take care that no one hates you justly."

~ Publilius Syrus  

"Men are rewarded and punished not for what they do,
but rather for how their acts are defined.
This is why men are more interested in better
justifying themselves than in behaving themselves."

~ Thomas Szasz  

"If you think there is freedom of the press in the United States,
I tell you there is no freedom of the press...
They come out with the cheap shot.
The press should be ashamed of itself.
They should come to both sides of the issue and hear both sides
and let the American people make up their minds."

~ Bill Moyers  

"It is discouraging to think
how many people are shocked by honesty
and how few by deceit."

~ Noel Coward  

"Nothing astonishes men so much as
common sense and plain dealing."

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson  

"The trouble with most folks
isn't so much their ignorance,
as knowing so many things
that ain't so."

~ Josh Billings  

"It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time
to realize that it has really nothing to say,
at the very moment when it has invented
so tremendous a trumpet for saying it."

~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton  

"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  

"A statesman who keeps his ear
permanently glued to the ground
will have neither elegance of posture
nor flexibility of movement."

~ Abba Eban  

"In towns it is impossible to prevent men from assembling,
getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves.
Towns are like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members.
In them the people wield immense influence over their magistrates
and often carry their desires into execution without intermediaries."

~ Alexis de Tocqueville  

"Governing a large country is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking."

~ Lao-Tzu  

"Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

~ George Orwell  

"[C]lassical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good -- anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.'"

~ C. S. Lewis  

"Socialism is the idea that violent force is an appropriate response to peaceful, voluntary exchange."

~ Frank J. Fleming