Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"But what is Freedom? Rightly understood,
A universal licence to be good."

~ Hartley Coleridge  

"Duties are not performed for duty's sake,
but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable.
A man performs but one duty --
the duty of contenting his spirit,
the duty of making himself agreeable to himself."

~ Mark Twain  

"Activate yourself to duty
by remembering your position, who you are,
and what you have obliged yourself to be."

~ Thomas Kempis  

"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy;
because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation."

~ Justice John Marshall  

"Politics doesn't work. Look at the parts of America where government has had the most power, where government has spent the most money. Look at the housing projects we've got the poor people in."

~ P. J. O'Rourke  

"Government can do something for the people
only in proportion as it can do something to the people. "

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"Many now believe that with the rise of the totalitarian State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will."

~ Albert Jay Nock  

"There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.
One declares so many things to be a crime
that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

~ Ayn Rand  

"Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."

~ Friedrich Nietzsche  

"The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power."

~ Albert Jay Nock  

"I regret to say it, but we are gradually turning over the business of Congress, turning over all our constitutional rights, turning over our powers delegated by the people to a lot of editors, theorists, and college professors who are not capable of conducting our affairs and to whom we should not abdicate."

~ Oscar Callaway  

"Political scientists almost everywhere
have promoted the expansion of government power.
They have functioned as the clergy of oppression."

~ Rudolph J. Rummel  

"One of the serious results of propaganda is that it has caused the public to think that education and propaganda are the same thing, and thus to make an ignorant multitude believe it is being educated when it is only being manipulated. Education aims at independence of judgement. Propaganda offers ready-made opinions for the unthinking herd."

~ Everett Dean Martin  

"It is the trivial, the irrelevant, the sensational, the appeal to obsolete bigotry which naturally give it greatest publicity. In such publicity it becomes a mere vulgar caricature of itself."

~ Everett Dean Martin  

"The educator aims at a slow process of development; the propagandist, at quick results. The educator tries to tell people how to think; the propagandist, what to think. The educator strives to develop individual responsibility; the propagandist, mass effects. The educator wants thinking; the propagandist, action. The educator fails unless he achieves an open mind; the propagandist, unless he achieves a closed mind."

~ Everett Dean Martin