Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Express everything you like.
No word can hurt you. None.
No idea can hurt you.
Not being able to express an idea or word
will hurt you more. Like a bullet."

~ Jamaica Kincaid  

"The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state; it ought not, therefore, to be restricted in this commonwealth."

~ Massachusetts Declaration of Rights  

"Academic freedom means the right, long accepted in the academic world,
to study, discuss, and write about facts and ideas without restrictions,
other than those imposed by conscience and morality."

~ Yale University  

"Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line.
What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed
group of vigilantes imposing their views on others."

~ Doris Lessing  

"From the standpoint of freedom of speech and the press,
it is enough to point out that the state has no legitimate interest
in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them...
It is not the business of government to suppress
real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine."

~ Justice Tom C. Clark  

"The First Amendment was designed to protect offensive speech,
because nobody ever tries to ban the other kind."

~ Mike Godwin  

"The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."

~ George Washington  

"All the public business in Congress
now connects itself with intrigues, and
there is great danger that the whole government
will degenerate into a struggle of cabals."

~ John Quincy Adams  

"But, sir, the people themselves have it in their power effectually to resist usurpation, without being driven to an appeal of arms. An act of usurpation is not obligatory; it is not law; and any man may be justified in his resistance. Let him be considered as a criminal by the general government, yet only his fellow-citizens can convict him; they are his jury, and if they pronounce him innocent, not all the powers of Congress can hurt him; and innocent they certainly will pronounce him, if the supposed law he resisted was an act of usurpation."

~ Theophilus Parsons  

"Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood."

~ John Adams  

"Therefore, the jury have the power of deciding an issue upon a general verdict. And, if they have, is it not an absurdity to suppose that the law would oblige them to find a verdict according to the direction of the court, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience? ... [I]s a juror to give his verdict generally, according to [the judge’s] direction, or even to find the fact specially, and submit the law to the court? Every man, of any feeling or conscience, will answer, no. It is not only his right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court."

~ John Adams  

"Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few."

~ John Adams  

"Remember, democracy never lasts long.
It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.
There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

~ John Adams  

"Individual liberty is individual power,
and as the power of a community
is a mass compounded of individual powers,
the nation which enjoys the most freedom
must necessarily be in proportion
to its numbers the most powerful nation."

~ John Quincy Adams  

"All good government is and must be republican. But at the same time, you can or will agree with me, that there is not in lexicography a more fraudulent word... Are we not, my friend, in danger of rendering the word republican unpopular in this country by an indiscreet, indeterminate, and equivocal use of it? [...] Whenever I use the word republic with approbation, I mean a government in which the people have collectively, or by representation, an essential share in the sovereignty... the republican forms in Poland and Venice are much worse, and those of Holland and Bern very little better, than the monarchical form in France before the late revolution."

~ John Adams