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| Leonardo da Vinci | | I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: "Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine? | |
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| Edward Dahlberg | | It takes a long time to understand nothing. | |
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| Daily Telegraph | | Today, The Daily Telegraph starts its 'A Free Country' campaign. Week by week, and in major individual investigations, we shall examine how freedom is being taken away, whether by Westminster or Whitehall or Brussels or any other authority. We shall try to annoy the control freaks, whether they are Right, Left or Centre, and we shall welcome allies for freedom from all quarters. The Conservative leadership contestants hardly breathe a word about freedom. The Labour Government's Queen's Speech is a shopping list of attacks on our liberties. There's plenty to do. Libertad o muerte! | |
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| Dalai Lama | | If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun. | |
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| Mayor Richard Daley | | The police are not here to create disorder. The police are here to preserve disorder. | |
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| Curtis Dall | | ...it was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World-Money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York Market. | |
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| Curtis Dall | | ...Most of his thoughts, his political 'ammunition,'...were carefully manufactured for him in advance by the CFR-One World Money group. Brilliantly... he exploded that prepared 'ammunition' in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people--and thus paid off and retained his internationalist political support. | |
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| Theodore Dalrymple | | Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. | |
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| William Damon | | There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers. | |
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| Richard Henry Dana, Jr. | | Our experience has shown us that in the excitement of great popular elections, deciding the policy of the country, and its vast patronage, frauds will be committed, if a chance is given for them. If these frauds are allowed, the result is not only that the popular will may be defeated, and the result falsified, but that the worst side will prevail. The side which has the greater number of dishonest men will poll the most votes. The war cry, "Vote early and vote often!" and the familiar problem, "how to cast the greatest number of votes with the smallest number of voters", indicate the direction in which the dangers lie. | |
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| Frank Dane | | Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything. | |
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| John C. Danforth | | I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. ... I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. ... We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected. | |
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| Alma Daniel | | It is up to you to decide whether or not you’re ready to be free, really free.
This pertains to your relationship as well as your activities in the world.
You are limitless, if you choose that! Your freedom comes from letting go.
Freedom means empowerment to be, do, go, feel, whatever your heart tells you.
Only you have kept yourself from having this freedom out of some
misunderstanding of what your responsibilities really are.
Your responsibilities are to your Self. Serve that truly, fully, and you serve All. | |
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| Myra Janco Daniels | | Every private citizen has a public responsibility. | |
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| Danish Proverb | | He who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning. | |
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| Dante | | The hottest places in hell
are reserved for those
who in a period of moral crisis
maintain their neutrality. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | 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. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private school . . . At the next session you may ban books and newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | There is no such thing as justice -- in or out of court. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it. | |
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| Clarence S. Darrow | | The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith. | |
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| Charles Darwin | | To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. | |
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| Charles Darwin | | False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened. | |
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| Charles Darwin | | The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank. | |
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| Charles Darwin | | The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal. | |
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| Charles Darwin | | Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. | |
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| Steve Dasbach | | Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic -- why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students. | |
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| Ram Dass | | If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible. | |
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| James Dale Davidson | | When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both. | |
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| James Dale Davidson | | The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless. | |
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| William Richardson Davie | | So low and hopeless are the finances of the United States, that, the year before last Congress was obliged to borrow money even, to pay the interest of the principal which we had borrowed before. This wretched resource of turning interest into principal, is the most humiliating and disgraceful measure that a nation could take, and approximates with rapidity to absolute ruin: Yet it is the inevitable and certain consequence of such a system as the existing Confederation. | |
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| Justice David Davis | | The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people,
equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection
all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.
No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences,
was ever invented by the wit of man than
that any of its provisions can be suspended
during any of the great exigencies of government.
Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism,
but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false;
for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it,
which are necessary to preserve its existence;
as has been happily proved by the result
of the great effort to throw off its just authority. | |
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| Elmer Davis | | The Republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it ...
This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave. | |
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| Elmer Davis | | This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle – among others – that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error; that in the competition of the marketplace of ideas, the sounder ideas will in the long run win out. | |
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| Elmer Davis | | The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it. | |
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| Jefferson Davis | | Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule. | |
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| Lisa E. Davis | | It is ironic that our government, which has been relentlessly critical of the messages that popular culture imparts to our youth, would seek to silence an artist who uses the medium of hip hop to preach a message of self respect and self reliance to young women and girls. | |
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| Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis | | Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings
for making everything compulsory
that isn't forbidden. | |
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| Richard Dawkins | | Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. | |
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| John De Armond | | You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal. | |
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| Honoré de Balzac | | There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events. | |
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| Honore de Balzac | | Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph. | |
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| Honore de Balzac | | Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. | |
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| Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais | | I claim for the nation an education that depends only on the State, because children of the State must be raised by members of the State. | |
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| Miguel de Cervantes | | It is the part of wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket. | |
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| Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort | | Society is composed of two great classes - those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners. | |
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| Luc de Clapiers | | The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of pleasures. | |
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| Voltairine de Cleyre | | Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license,” and they will define freedom out of existence. | |
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| Voltairine de Cleyre | | The revolution is ... the blow dealt ... against the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty. | |
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| Voltairine de Cleyre | | ...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. | |
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| Charles de Gaulle | | In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant. | |
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| Charles De Gaulle | | Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word. | |
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| Charles De Gaulle | | I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians. | |
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| Charles de Gaulle | | In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant. | |
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| Remy De Gourmont | | The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it. | |
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| Remy de Gourmont | | Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free. | |
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| Perry de Havilland | | A large number of people, certainly the majority of the political looter class, think the best way to deal with the rapidly deepening economic crisis is via 'stimulus packages' with money plucked off the magic money tree... which is to say, by trying to re-inflate the credit bubble that actually caused the crisis. This is a bit like treating alcoholics by urging them to buy more whiskey. | |
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| Perry de Havilland | | I have often lamented that with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the forces of liberalism did not spend nearly enough time ruthlessly driving intellectual stakes through the hearts of all those who supported the 'Evil Empire' or preached appeasement or claimed that the Soviet system was 'just another way of living' rather than a mass murderous tyranny. | |
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| Perry de Havilland | | The Radical Centre seem to have the same obsession with control that the fascists and communists had, but unlike them, it is control for control's sake rather than in the service of some clear ideology ... They do not seek the triumph of Volk or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they just seek to replace all social interactions with politically mediated interactions. They seek to regulate everything via a total state that ... just wants a world in which nothing whatsoever is private, everything is political. Their symbol is not the Hammer and Sickle or the Swastika, it is the CCTV camera. | |
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| Anthony de Jasay | | ... the smaller the domain where choices among alternatives are made collectively, the smaller will be the probability that any individual's preference gets overruled. | |
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| Anthony de Jasay | | People who live in states have as a rule never experienced the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical possibility of moving from the one to the other ... On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses about the relative merits of state and state of nature? ... My contention here is that preferences for political arrangements of society are to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that political institutions are either addictive like some drugs, or allergy-inducing like some others, or both, for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others. | |
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| Anthony de Jasay | | Self-imposed limits on sovereign power can disarm mistrust, but provide no guarantee of liberty and property beyond those afforded by the balance between state and private force. | |
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| Anthony de Jasay | | In the process of helping some (perhaps most) people to more utility and justice, the state imposes on civil society a system of interdictions and commands. | |
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| Anthony de Jasay | | Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure. | |
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| Anthony de Jasay | | People who live in states have as a rule never experienced
the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical
possibility of moving from the one to the other ...
On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses
about the relative merits of state and state of nature? ...
My contention here is that preferences for political arrangements of society are
to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that
political institutions are either addictive like some drugs,
or allergy-inducing like some others, or both,
for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others. | |