Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes
 
 Click on the name to open the full quote and the details about the quote's origin. Quotes are also grouped by Category and Author.  
 


The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
A classic since 1953 with over 20,000 quotes from over 3,000 authors.


Famous Last Words
Apt Observations, Pleas, Curses, Benedictions, Sour Notes, Bons Mots, and Insights from People on the Brink of Departure


Stretch Your Wings
Famous Black Quotations for the Young


American Quotations
An exhaustive collection of profound quotes from the founding fathers, presidents, statesmen, scientists, constitutions, court decisions


The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations


Last Words of Saints and Sinners
700 Final Quotes from the Famous, the Infamous, and the Inspiring Figures of History


America's God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations
Contains over 2,100 profound quotations from founding fathers, presidents, constitutions, court decisions and more


The Law
This 1850 classic is an absolute must read for anyone interested in law, justice, truth, or liberty. A most compelling and revolutionary look at The Law.


Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition)


The Stupidest Things Ever Said by Politicians
Rise up, America -- and laugh out loud at the greatest gaffes that no spin doctor could possibly fix!


The 776 Even Stupider Things Ever Said
Another great collection of stupidity


Quotable Quotes
Wit and Wisdom for All Occasions from America's Most Popular Magazine


The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time
You don't have to be a genius to sound like one. Here's a collection of the most profound and provocative wit and wisdom in the English language in two lines or less.


2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs
Invaluable sampler of witticisms, epigrams, sayings, bon mots, platitudes and insights chosen for their brevity and pithiness.


Phillips' Book of Great Thoughts Funny Sayings
A stupendous collection of quotes, quips, epigrams, witticisms, and humorous comments for personal enjoyment and ready reference.


Quick Quips and Quotes; 532 Things I Wish I Had Said
Quick Quips and Quotes is the Ultimate Collection of one liners.


Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes
The ultimate anthology of anecdotes, now revised with over 700 new entries.


Quotations for Public Speakers
A Historical, Literary, and Political Anthology


Liberty - The American Revolution
This compelling series traces the events leading up to the war and America's fight for freedom.


Founding Fathers
The story of how these disparate characters fomented rebellion in the colonies, formed the Continental Congress, fought the Revolutionary War, and wrote the Constitution


Libertarianism: A Primer
David Boaz, director of the Cato Institute, has written a simple introduction to Libertarianism inteneded to appeal to disgruntled Democrats and Republicans everywhere.


The Libertarian Reader
Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman


Thomas Paine: Collected Writings
All the classics: Common Sense / The Crisis / Rights of Man / The Age of Reason / Pamphlets, Articles, and Letters

 
Mayor Richard DaleyThe police are not here to create disorder. The police are here to preserve disorder. 
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. 
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. 
Theodore DalrymplePolitical 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.   
William DamonThere 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. 
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. 
Frank DaneGet all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything. 
John C. DanforthI 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. 
Alma DanielIt 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. 
Myra Janco DanielsEvery private citizen has a public responsibility. 
Danish ProverbHe who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning. 
DanteThe hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. 
Clarence S. DarrowThe law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business. 
Clarence S. DarrowThere is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action. 
Clarence S. DarrowI have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood. 
Clarence S. DarrowChase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails. 
Clarence S. DarrowYou can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. 
Clarence S. DarrowThe 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. 
Clarence S. DarrowThe 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. 
Clarence S. DarrowLiberty 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. 
Clarence S. DarrowIf 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. 
Clarence S. DarrowYou can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free. 
Clarence S. DarrowThere is no such thing as justice -- in or out of court. 
Clarence S. DarrowThe 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. 
Clarence S. DarrowThe 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. 
Clarence S. DarrowWhen I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it. 
Clarence S. DarrowThe 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. 
Charles DarwinTo 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. 
Charles DarwinFalse 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. 
Charles DarwinThe school as a means of education to me was simply a blank. 
Charles DarwinThe 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. 
Charles DarwinIgnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. 
Steve DasbachGovernment 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. 
Ram DassIf you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible. 
James Dale DavidsonWhen you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both. 
James Dale DavidsonThe 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. 
William Richardson DavieSo 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. 
Justice David DavisThe 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. 
Elmer DavisThe 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. 
Elmer DavisThis 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. 
Elmer DavisThe republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it. 
Jefferson DavisNeither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule. 
Lisa E. DavisIt 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. 
Manuel Garcia O'Kelly DavisSeems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden. 
Richard DawkinsFaith 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. 
John De ArmondYou know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal. 
Honoré de BalzacThere are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events. 
Honore de BalzacLiberty 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. 
Honore de BalzacBureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies. 
Louis-René de Caradeuc de La ChalotaisI 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. 
Miguel de CervantesIt is the part of wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket. 
Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de ChamfortSociety is composed of two great classes - those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners. 
Luc de ClapiersThe fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of pleasures. 
Voltairine de CleyreMake 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. 
Voltairine de CleyreThe 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. 
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. 
Charles de GaulleIn order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant. 
Charles De GaulleSince a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word. 
Charles De GaulleI have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians. 
Charles de GaulleIn order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant. 
Remy De GourmontThe terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it. 
Remy de GourmontMoney is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free. 
Perry de HavillandA 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. 
Perry de HavillandI 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. 
Perry de HavillandThe 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. 
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. 
Anthony de JasayPeople 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. 
Anthony de JasaySelf-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. 
Anthony de JasayIn 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. 
Anthony de JasayHaving 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. 
Anthony de JasayPeople 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. 
Bertrand de JouvenelDemocracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation. 
Bertrand de JouvenelA society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. 
Bertrand de JouvenelA society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. 
Bertrand de JouvenelThe more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State. 


Daily Quotes
Ready to be inspired?
Sign up for a daily dose of Liberty Quotes!
Leave us your email address to subscribe.
Email:

Here's the Daily Quote history.

Quotes
Here's our full collection of famous quotations.

Categories
Browse quotes by category.

Authors
Browse quotes by Author or Speaker.








(c) Copyright 1999-2024