Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion all have a double aspect – freedom of thought and freedom of action."

~ Frank Murphy  

"Every prudent and cautious judge ... will remember, that his duty and his business is, not to make the law, but to interpret and apply it."

~ James Wilson  

"Of...freedom [of thought and speech] one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom."

~ Justice Benjamin Cardozo

"All bad precedents began as justifiable measures."

~ Gaius Julius Caesar  

"A free press stands as one of the great interpreters between the government and the people. To allow it to be fettered is to fetter ourselves."

~ George Sutherland  

"By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license,
such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech."

~ Harry A. Blackmun  

"Take nothing on its looks;
take everything on evidence.
There's no better rule."

~ Charles Dickens  

"Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices.
This is corruption in reality, give it whatever other name you please."

~ David Dudley Field, II  

"We are more especially called upon to maintain the principles of free discussion in case of unpopular sentiments or persons, as in no other case will any effort to maintain them be needed."

~ Edward Beecher  

"A theory deeply etched in our law [is that] a free society prefers to punish the few who abuse the rights of free speech after they break the law rather than to throttle them and all others beforehand."

~ Justice Clarence Thomas  

"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis

"The very aim and end of our institutions is just this:
that we may think what we like and say what we think."

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.  

"I cannot conceive a rank more honorable, than that which flows from the uncorrupted choice of a brave and free people, the purest source and original fountain of all power."

~ George Washington  

"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it?
Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom?
Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."

~ Thomas Jefferson (False)  

"We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends,
not because we deserve it,
but because others before us
put their lives on the line to defend it."

~ Thomas Sowell