Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"It is a general popular error to suppose
the loudest complainers for the public
to be the most anxious for its welfare."

~ Edmund Burke  

"Either you think -- or else others have to
think for you and take power from you,
pervert and discipline your natural tastes,
civilize and sterilize you."

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald  

"It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."

~ John Adams  

"It [government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

~ Alexis de Tocqueville  

"These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth."

~ Anacharsis  

"Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, of course, lays out the delegated, enumerated, and therefore limited powers of Congress. Only through a deliberate misreading of the general welfare and commerce clauses of the Constitution has the federal government been allowed to overreach its authority and extend its tendrils into every corner of civil society."

~ Edward H. Crane  

"Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and
in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high
with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law
and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and
the like."

~ Justice William O. Douglas  

"Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land."

~ Justice William O. Douglas  

"The struggle is always between the individual
and his sacred right to express himself
and... the power structure that seeks
conformity, suppression and obedience."

~ Justice William O. Douglas  

"Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds
while withholding some of the facts from them."

~ Harold Evans  

"As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends."

~ Jeremy Bentham  

"'Balanced' is a code for 'denied':
a right to free speech that must be 'balanced'
against so exhaustive a list of other supposed
values means a right that can be exercised
only when those in power judge that the
speech in question is innocuous to them."

~ Ronald Dworkin  

"Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes,
vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful
because of their ability to remain invisible while operating
behind the national scenery."

~ Buckminster Fuller  

"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits."

~ Edward L. Bernays  

"You demonize...we call it the wrap-up smear, you smear somebody with falsehoods and all the rest, and then you merchandise it and then you write it and say, "See, it's reported in the press that this, this, and this..." so they have that validation that the press reported the smear and then it's called a wrap-up-smear and the merchandise is the press' report on the smear we made. It's a tactic, and it's self-evident."

~ Nancy Pelosi