Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed, it is very probable that, by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached. It is because we do not yet know which of the many competing new opinions will prove itself the best that we wait until it has gained sufficient support."

~ Friedrich August von Hayek  

"There are things that are so serious
that you can only joke about them."

~ Heisenberg

"If you fear making anyone mad,
then you ultimately probe for the lowest
common denominator of human achievement."

~ Jimmy Carter  

"By doubting we all come at truth."

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero  

"I see men ordinarily more eager
to discover a reason for things
than to find out whether things are so."

~ Michel De Montaigne  

"There are two kinds of statistics,
the kind you look up and the kind you make up."

~ Rex Stout  

"What is the fairest fruit of the English Tree of Liberty? The security of our rights and of the law, and that no man shall be brought to trial where there is a prejudice against him."

~ Thomas Erskine  

"A criminal trial is not a search for truth.
It is much too circumscribed for that.
Rather, a trial is a formalized contest for
the hearts and minds of a panel of twelve.
It is a quest for a verdict in which information
is selected and screened (we can almost say “processed”)
before it is allowed to reach jurors."

~ Phillip Finch  

"For those who believe, no proof is necessary.
For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible."

~ Stuart Chase

"Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress
that can beguile the brain and soul of man.
From him who will not give her all, she will have nothing.
She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray.
But when once the fierce heat
of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned
into the victim's heart,
he will know no other smile but hers."

~ Clarence S. Darrow  

"Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization...
The history of civilization is in considerable measure
the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth
by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths.
Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not
to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge."

~ Felix Frankfurter  

"Persecution, whenever it occurs,
establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor,
not the truth and worth of his belief."

~ H. M. Kallen  

"Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little
of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent
obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children
for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses."

~ C. S. Lewis  

"Whenever the offence inspires
less horror than the punishment,
the rigour of penal law is obliged
to give way to the common feelings
of mankind."

~ Edward Gibbon  

~ Frederick the Great