Liberty Quotes - Daily Email History

"The penalty good men pay
for indifference to public affairs,
is to be ruled by evil men."

~ Plato  

~ Plutarch  

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth."

~ Ronald Reagan  

"Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks.
Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools.
And their grand-children are once more slaves."

~ D. H. Lawrence  

"Debate, it seems to me, is one of the most useful of human inventions. It is the mother and father of all free inquiry and honest thought. It tests ideas, detects errors and promotes clear thinking. A man cannot stand up before it without exposing his whole intellectual stock of goods."

~ H. L. Mencken  

"A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

~ James Madison  

"How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism."

~ James Monroe  

"It is a great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all it's good dispositions."

~ Thomas Jefferson  

"Let it [the Constitution] be taught in schools, seminaries and in colleges; let it be written in primers, in spelling books and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, enforced in courts of justice. In short, let it become the political religion of the nation."

~ Abraham Lincoln  

"A wholesome regard for the memory of the great men of long ago
is the best assurance to a people of a continuation of great men to come,
who shall be able to instruct, to lead, and to inspire. A people who
worship at the shrine of true greatness will themselves be truly great."

~ Calvin Coolidge  

"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression.
In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains
seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must
be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become
unwitting victims of the darkness."

~ Justice William O. Douglas  

"I want to make one thing clear. This war against our constitution is not being fought way off in Madagascar or in Mandalay. It is being fought here—in our schools, our colleges, our churches, our women’s clubs. It is being fought with our money, channeled through the State Department. It is being fought twenty-four hours a day—while we remain asleep. How many of you Senators know what the UN is doing to change the teaching of the children in your own home town? The UN is at work there, every day and night, changing the teachers, changing the teaching materials, changing the very words and tones—changing all the essential ideas which we imagine our schools are teaching to our young folks. How in the name of Heaven are we to sit here, approve these programs, appropriate our own people’s money—for such outrageous “orientation” of our own children, and of the men and women who teach our children, in this Nation’s schools?"

~ William Jenner  

"It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is
exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives."

~ Dorothy Thompson  

"It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly-prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong."

~ James Fenimore Cooper  

"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them."

~ John Adams