"At
all times sincere friends of
freedom
have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities...."
Lord
Acton
"Statesmen...may
plan and speculate
for Liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish
the principles upon which Freedom can securely stand."
John
Adams
"Individual
liberty is individual power, and as the power
of a community is a mass compounded of individual powers, the nation
which enjoys the most freedom must
necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation."
John Quincy Adams
"The
truth is, all
might
be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought. ...If
therefore
a people will not be free; if they have not virtue enough to maintain
their
liberty against a presumptuous invader, they deserve no pity, and are
to
be treated with contempt and ignominy."
Samuel
Adams
"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men."
Mortimer Adler (1902-2001)
"Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when we decide how to respond."
Jeffery Borenstein
"Liberals
are constitutionally
unable
to understand that every tax represents a transfer of power and
freedom from the people to the
government."
Linda
Bowles
"Those who won
our independence
believed
that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their
faculties;
and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over
the arbitrary. They valued liberty
both as an end and as a
means.
They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be
the
secret of liberty."
Louis
D. Brandeis
"Our
culture is superior because
our
religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free."
Patrick
J. Buchanan
"The
way
to keep America free and
secure is to
stay out of wars that do not affect our vital
interests, and let alien
societies work out their own destinies. As time was our ally against
communism,
which did not work, so time is our ally against Islamism, which also
does
not work."
Pat
Buchanan "Freedom
and not servitude is the
cure
of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for
superstition."
Edmund Burke
"Men are qualified for civil
liberty
in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their
own
appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will
and
appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the
more
there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things
that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge
their
fetters."
Edmund Burke "For those who
stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent
task than to come to understand the mechanisms and
practices of indoctrination. These are easy to
perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in
the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we
are subjected and which all too often we serve as
willing or unwitting instruments."
Noam
Chomsky,
(1928- ) American linguist and political writer
"A
government which requires of the
people the contribution of the bulk of their substance and rewards
cannot
be classed as a free government, or long remain as such."
Calvin
Coolidge
"The
property of the people belongs
to the people. To take it from them by taxation cannot be justified
except
by urgent public necessity. Unless this principle be recognized our
country
is no longer secure, our people no longer free."
Calvin
Coolidge
"Ideas
are
indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom
are the most powerful political weapons
man has ever forged."
William O. Douglas, Source: An Almanac of Liberty, 1954
"Nature
smiles at the union of freedom
and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and
everlasting
enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and
their
natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England
and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the
growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after
1917.
Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the
average
in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of
superior
ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way."
Will
Durant
"Forced
to choose, the poor, like
the
rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political
freedom
capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from
denuding
the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by
violence
or votes."
Will
Durant
"Being a
lover of freedom, when the
[Nazi] revolution came, I looked to the universities to defend it,
knowing
that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth;
but
no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the
great
editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone had
proclaimed
their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced
in
a few short weeks.... Only the Church stood squarely across the path of
Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special
interest
in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration
for
it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to
stand
for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I
once despised I now praise unreservedly."
Albert
Einstein
"Everything
that is really great
and
inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
Albert
Einstein (1950)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"There have existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men - the lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power."
Robert Y. Haynes, U.S. Senator, January 21, 1830
"If we wish
to be free; if we mean
to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have
been
so long contending; if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle
in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged
ourselves
never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be
obtained
-- we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to
arms,
and to the God of hosts, is all that is left us."
Patrick
Henry
"I doubt if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power - power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate."
Eric Hoffer, Source: quoted in Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey (Calvin Tompkins), 1968
"The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do."
Eric Hoffer
"To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility."
Eric Hoffer
"The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor."
Eric Hoffer
"People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self."
Eric Hoffer
"Freedom in art,
freedom in society, this is the
double goal towards which all consistent
and logical minds must strive."
Victor Hugo "The right to be
heard does not
automatically
include the right to be taken seriously."
Hubert
H. ########
"People demand
freedom of speech to
make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."
Soren
Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
"The
principle of free speech is no new doctrine born of the Constitution of
the United States. It is a heritage of English-speaking peoples, which
has been won by incalculable sacrifice, and which they must preserve so
long as they hope to live as free men."
Robert M.
Lafollette, Sr. (1855-1925) U.S. Senator Source:
Speech, 6 October 1917
"Freedom
of men under government is to have a standing rule to live
by, common to every one of that society...and not to be subject to the
inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man."
John
Locke
" .
. . (F)reedom is dependent
ultimately
upon what is in the hearts of the people. Freedom is not safe if it is
written only with ink in the Constitution. It must be written also in
the
fleshy tables of the heart."
J.
Gresham Machen (1934)
"Everywhere there
arises
before our eyes the spectre of a society where security, if it is
attained
at all, will be attained at the expense of freedom,
where the security
that is attained will be security of fed beasts in a stable, and where
all the high aspirations of humanity will have been crushed by an
all-powerful
State."
J. Gresham Machen
"If a nation or
an individual values
anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony is
that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too."
W.
Somerset Maugham
"The
essential characteristic of Western civilization that
distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the
East was and is its concern for freedom from
the state. The history of
the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day
resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for
liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders."
Ludwig
Von Mises
"The
most serious dangers for American freedom
and the American way of life do not come from without."
"None can love freedom
heartily, but good men;
the rest love not freedom, but license."
John Milton "We
cannot defend
freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
Edward
R. Murrow (1908-1965),
American Broadcast Newsman"Freedom is not
empowerment.
Empowerment
is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be
empowered.
It's not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and
how free are they? It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights--the
'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food
and
housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights,
those
are the rations of slavery--hay and a barn for human cattle. There's
only
one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And
with
it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
P.J.
O'Rourke
"One
of the annoying things about
believing
in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty in finding
someone to blame your troubles on. And when you do find someone, it's
remarkable
how often their picture turns up on your driver's license."
P.J.
O'Rourke
"Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
George Orwell
"We stand here
on the only island
of
freedom that is left in the whole
world. There is no place left
to
flee to ... no place to escape to. We defend freedom here or it
is
gone. There is no place for us to run, only to make a
stand.
And if we fail, I think we face telling our children, and our
children's
children, what it was we found more precious than freedom.
Because
I am sure someday -- if we fail in this -- there will be a generation
that
will ask."
Ronald Reagan
"It
is worth noting that the people
today who so vehemently wish to sweep religion
from all public spaces
and
institutions are also the same people who
consistently oppose freedom. They want
only one God -- the state, which of course they intend to
run."
Charley
Reese
"The
idea that men
are created free and equal is both true and
misleading: men are created different; they lose their
social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to
become like each other."
David
Reisman, American Sociologist"To centralize
power in the name of
freedom is akin to putting a crime syndicate
in charge of rooting out
corruption.
It is the normal state of politics that the
more centralized it is, the
more damage it does. Fast-track authority [for
government-to-government
trade agreements] centralizes power and is therefore part of the
problem."
"[The
current presidential saga]
demonstrates
that the process -- riddled with graft, rigged counts, and media lies
--
does not and cannot bring us heaven on earth. For freedom
to thrive, we
need a depoliticized society, one in which the fate of civilization
does
not hinge on who is elected. Far more decisive for our future than any
election are the ideas that triumph in our nation's intellectual life.
That battle makes the Florida vote count look calm."
Lew
Rockwell
"Ammunition
beats persuasion when
you are looking for freedom."
Will
Rogers
"...[T]here can
be no truly moral
choice unless that choice is made in freedom; similarly, there can be
no
really firmly grounded and consistent defense of freedom unless that
defense
is rooted in moral principle."
Murray
N. Rothbard
"Freedom can exist
only in the society of knowledge. Without
learning, men are
incapable of knowing their rights."
Benjamin Rush
"Freedom... refer[s] to a social relationship among people -- namely,the absence of force as a prospective instrument of decision making. Freedom is reduced whenever a decision is made under threat of force, whether or not force actually materializes or is evident in retrospect."
Thomas
Sowell (1930- ) Economist
& Writer
"We are... living in a free society without the faith that built that society - and without the conviction and dedication needed to sustain it... We still have the cathedral of freedom but how long will it last without the faith?"
Thomas Sowell
"Freedom does not
always win. This is one of
the bitterest lessons of history."
A. J. P.
Taylor"Despotism may
be able to do without
faith, but freedom cannot."
Alexis
de Tocqueville, "Democracy
in
America"
"The
man who asks of freedom
anything
other than itself is born to be a slave."
Alexis
de Tocqueville "The Old
Regime
and the French Revolution" (1856)
"No
protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom
of a democratic
country."
Alexis
de
Tocqueville
"I
know of
no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real
freedom of discussion as in America."
Alexis
de
Tocqueville
"There
is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality
which excites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion
tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists
also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which
impels
the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to
prefer
equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. I believe that it is
easier
to establish an absolute and despotic government
amongst a people in
which
the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and I
think
that, if such a government were once established amongst such a people,
it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them
of several of the highest qualities of humanity. Despotism, therefore,
appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic
times."
Alexis de
Tocqueville,
Democracy
in America, Book 1 Chapter III [1835]
"Put fear out of your heart. This nation will
survive, this state
will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men
can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold --
by voice, by posted card, by letter, or by press. Reason never has
failed men. Only force and oppression have made the wrecks in the
world."
William Allen White, Emporia Gazette
[July 27, 1922
"It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated governmentpower. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong."
