Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded."

~ Vance Packard  

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.
We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens,
and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution.
The freeman of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened
itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents.
They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided
the consequences by denying the principle."

~ James Madison  

"[R]estricting arms to the military and police eviscerates the principle that power should flow from the people to government, and turns the government into a master rather than a servant."

~ Robert Dowlut  

"It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother,
because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster."

~ Voltaire  

"It is bad to be oppressed by a minority,
but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority."

~ Lord Acton  

"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen
but by him who resists it."

~ John Hay  

"Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown."

~ Prince Peter Kropotkin  

"Freedom for supporters of the government only,
for members of one party only --
no matter how big its membership may be -- is no freedom at all.
Freedom is always freedom for the man who thinks differently."

~ Rosa Luxemburg  

"To punish a man because we infer
from the nature of some doctrine which he holds,
or from the conduct of other persons
who hold the same doctrines with him,
that he will commit a crime, is persecution,
and is, in every case, foolish and wicked."

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay  

"Restriction of free thought and free speech
is the most dangerous of all subversions.
It is the one un-American act
that could most easily defeat us."

~ Justice William O. Douglas  

"The busybodies have begun to infect
American society with a nasty intolerance --
a zeal to police the private lives of others
and hammer them into standard forms --
A Nation of Finger Pointers."

~ Lance Morrow  

"Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery."

~ Lawana Blackwell  

"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down."

~ Frederick Douglass  

"Honest difference of views and honest debate are not disunity.
They are the vital process of policy among free men."

~ Herbert Hoover  

"When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking,
I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing
now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years
after you and I shall write and speak no more."

~ John Adams