Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Avoid any specific discussion of public policy at public meetings."

~ Quintus Tullius Cicero  

"Everything you read in the press is absolutely true.
Except the rare event of which you have personal knowledge."

~ Erwin Knoll  

"The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press,
is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish."

~ Justice Robert H. Jackson  

"Once the government becomes the supplier of people's needs,
there is no limit to the needs that will be claimed as a basic right."

~ Lawrence Auster  

"Government isn't a good way to solve problems ... [G]overnment is concerned mostly with self-perpetuation and is subject to fantastic ideas about its own capabilities. ... [G]overnment is wasteful of the nation's resources, immune to common sense and subject to pressure from every half-organized bouquet of assholes. ... [G]overnment is distrustful of and disrespectful toward average Americans while being easily gulled by Americans with money, influence or fame."

~ P. J. O'Rourke  

"To subject an artist’s work to a litmus test of political probity --
and to punish institutions that will not carry out the mandate of the
state -- is to traffic in the thought control that gave us Stalinism
and Nazism..."

~ Richard Goldstein

"Liberty is the possibility of doubting,
the possibility of making a mistake,
the possibility of searching and experimenting,
the possibility of saying "No" to any authority --
literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political."

~ Ignazio Silone  

"Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant
obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are
all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of
our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or
primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it
is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature.
It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we
can preserve no other."

~ John Locke  

"Liberty and good government do not exclude each other;
and there are excellent reasons why they should go together.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end.
It is itself the highest political end."

~ Lord Acton  

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."

~ Aldous Huxley  

"There's a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is: "Beat it to death if it succeeds." "

~ Ernie Kovacs  

"It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted, especially in France. This is greatly due to a fatal desire -- learned from the teachings of antiquity -- that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy."

~ Frederic Bastiat  

"Non-cooperation with evil
is as much a duty as is
cooperation with good."

~ Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi  

"Make no mistake about it -- and tell it to your Republican friends: capitalism and altruism cannot coexist in the same man or in the same society. Tell it to anyone who attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of the "public good" or the "general welfare" or "service to society" or the benefit it brings to the poor.  All these things are true, but they are the by-products, the secondary consequences of capitalism -- not its goal, purpose or moral justification.  The moral justification of capitalism is man's right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; it is the recognition that man -- every man -- is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others, not a sacrificial animal serving anyone's need."

~ Ayn Rand  

"Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth."

~ George Washington