Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people.
To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations."

~ Paul Valéry  

"It has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing
the principles of Freedom, to say, that government is a compact
between those who govern and those that are governed:
but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before
the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed,
there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist,
and consequently there could originally exist no governors
to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the
individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right,
entered into a compact with each other to produce a government:
and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise,
and the only principle on which they have a right to exist."

~ Thomas Paine  

"Freedom of thought is the only guarantee
against an infection of people by mass myths,
which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues,
can be transformed into bloody dictatorships."

~ Andrei Sakharov  

"Over himself, over his own body and mind,
the individual is sovereign."

~ John Stuart Mill  

"The poorest man may in his cottage,
bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown.
It may be frail, its roof may shake;
the wind may blow through it;
the storm may enter; the rain may enter;
but the King of England may not enter;
all his force dares not cross the threshold
of the ruined tenement."

~ William Pitt  

"There is only one success:
to be able to spend your life in your own way,
and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it."

~ Christopher Darlington Morley  

"I am beginning to realize that "sanity"
is no longer a value or an end in itself.
If modern people were a little less sane,
a little more doubtful, a little more aware
of their absurdities and contradictions,
perhaps there might be the possibility
of their survival."

~ Thomas Merton  

"To act without clear understanding,
to form habits without investigation,
to follow a path all one's life
without knowing where it really leads --
such is the behavior of the multitude."

~ Mencius  

"I will not surrender responsibility for my life and my actions."

~ John Enoch Powell  

Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals. "

~ James Fenimore Cooper

"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is
that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox
in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force
citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

~ Justice Robert H. Jackson  

"Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations."

~ Milton Friedman  

"But as the plan of the [Constitutional] convention
aims only at a partial union or consolidation,
the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty
which they before had, and which were not, by that act,
EXCLUSIVELY delegated to the United States."

~ Alexander Hamilton  

"The States are nations."

~ Daniel Webster  

"The thirteen States are thirteen Sovereignties."

~ James Wilson