Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"We do not move forward by curtailing people’s liberty
because we are afraid of what they may do or say."

~ Eleanor Roosevelt  

"No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you
can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more
pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire
to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of
debate must be regarded as a sacred right."

~ William E. Borah  

"The objector and the rebel who raises his voice
against what he believes to be the injustice
of the present and the wrongs of the past
is the one who hunches the world along."

~ Clarence S. Darrow  

"How did it happen? How did our national government grow from a servant with sharply limited powers into a master with virtually unlimited power? In part, we were swindled. There are occasions when we have elevated men and political parties to power that promised to restore limited government and then proceeded, after their election, to expand the activities of government. But let us be honest with ourselves. Broken promises are not the major causes of our trouble. Kept promises are. All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of 'security.' We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapture of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system. We have gone the way of many a democratic society that has lost its freedom by persuading itself that if 'the people' rule, all is well."

~ Barry Goldwater  

"I am a Canadian,
free to speak without fear,
free to worship in my own way,
free to stand for what I think right,
free to oppose what I believe wrong, or
free to choose those who shall govern my country.
This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind."

~ John G. Diefenbaker  

"It was not by accident or coincidence that
the rights to freedom in speech and press
were coupled in a single guaranty
with the rights of the people peaceably
to assemble and to petition for redress of grievances.
All these, though not identical, are inseparable.
They are cognate rights, and therefore
are united in the first Article’s assurance."

~ Judge Wiley B. Rutledge  

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone
who has read history, is man’s original virtue.
It is through disobedience that progress had been made,
through disobedience and through rebellion."

~ Oscar Wilde  

"The worst tyrants are those which
establish themselves in our own breasts."

~ William Ellery Channing  

~ Albert J. Beveridge  

"The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation. It is the prolonged sacrifice of the rights of some persons at the bidding and for the satisfaction of other persons. The ruling idea of the politician - stated rather bluntly - is that those who are opposed to him exist for the purpose of being made to serve his ends, if he can get power enough in his hands to force these ends upon them."

~ Auberon Herbert  

"If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens,
you can never regain their respect and esteem.
It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time;
you can even fool some of the people all of the time;
but you can't fool all of the people all the time."

~ Abraham Lincoln  

"That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude."

~ Alexander Haig  

“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe,
as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people.
Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted
for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses."

~ Major General Smedley Darlington Butler