Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as, from 1933 onward,
'political criminality' was given a much broader definition than ever
before and most forms of dissent and criticism were gradually
criminalized. The result was that more 'laws' or lawlike measures were
put on the books than ever."

~ Shelia Fitzpatrick  

"Thus arbitrary power will have divided men
of superior intelligence into two groups:
the former will be seditious, the latter corrupt..."

~ Benjamin Constant  

"By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt."

~ James Madison  

"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction.
Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another."

~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton  

"Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule."

~ Jefferson Davis  

"Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past."

~ Maurice Maeterlinck  

"It is the right of our people to organize to oppose any law and
any part of the constitution with which they are not in sympathy."

~ Alfred E. Smith  

"The idea of creating systems designed to threaten, coerce, and kill,
and to imbue such agencies with principled legitimacy, and not expect
them to lead to wars, genocides, and other tyrannical practices,
expresses an innocence we can no longer afford to indulge."

~ Butler D. Shaffer  

"Forcing people to be more 'unselfish' creates animosity instead of good will. Trying to control selfish others is a cure worse than the disease. ... In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. We point fingers at the dictators, the Communists, the politicians, and the international cartels. We are blithely unaware that our desire to control selfish others creates and sustains them. Like a stone thrown in a quiet pond, our desire to control our neighbors ripples outward, affecting the political course of our community, state, nation, and world. Yet we know not what we do. We attempt to bend our neighbors to our will, sincere in our belief that we are benevolently protecting the world from their folly and short-sightedness. We seek control to create peace and prosperity, not realizing that this is the very means by which war and poverty are propagated. In fighting for our dream without awareness, we become the instruments of its destruction. If we could only see the pattern!"

~ Dr. Mary J. Ruwart  

"The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty,
and can never be restrained but by despotic governments."

~ George Mason  

"A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners."

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"The real guarantee of freedom
is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict,
not the triumph of any one force."

~ Max Eastman  

"Political liberty is nothing else but the diffusion of power."

~ Lord Hailsham

"The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government."

~ Milton Friedman  

"In short, it is the greatest Absurdity to suppose it in the Power of one or any Number of Men, at the entering into Society, to renounce their essential natural Rights or the Means of preserving those Rights, when the grand End of civil Government, from the very Nature of its Institution, is for the Support, Protection and Defense of those very Rights: The principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property."

~ Samuel Adams