Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Toward no crimes have men
shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel
as in punishing differences of opinion."

~ James Russell Lowell  

"Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize the oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all... It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes."

~ Justice Hugo L. Black  

"The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees."

~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis  

"They who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it."

~ Dr. Samuel Johnson  

"... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people."

~ H. G. Wells  

"Let me get this straight. For the past quarter-century or more, the central government has been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars each year from competent, hard-working, successful people and giving it to incompetent, lazy failures. As a result, middle-class America has increasingly been impoverished while the poor are even poorer. Now come calls for reforming the system, and liberals are denouncing reformers in the vilest language. What planet did you say liberals are from?"

~ Paul Thiel  

"There’s a whiff of the lynch mob
or the lemming migration
about any over-large concentration
of like-minded individuals,
no matter how virtuous their cause."

~ P. J. O'Rourke  

"The Tenth Commandment sends a message
to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness,
to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 --
to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed.
And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell."

~ P. J. O'Rourke  

"Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights -- the "right" to education, the "right" to health care, the "right" to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are rations of slavery -- hay and a barn for human cattle. There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."

~ P. J. O'Rourke  

"Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating
but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading."

~ Eric Hoffer  

"Our tradition is one of protest and revolt,
and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past
while we silence the rebels of the present."

~ Henry Steele Commager  

"The right to comment freely and criticize the action, opinions, and
judgment of courts is of primary importance to the public generally.
Not only is it good for the public; but it has a salutary effect
on courts and judges as well."

~ James P. Hughes  

"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties
to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men,
disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman
called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men."

~ Gerald W. Johnson  

"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

~ Harry S. Truman  

"Freedom includes the right to say
what others may object to and resent...
The essence of citizenship is to be tolerant
of strong and provocative words."

~ John G. Diefenbaker