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| Gerhard Oestreich | | No external force will ever succeed in making you 'want what you do not want and believe what you do not believe'. A man may take my life, but not my faith. | |
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| The Emperor of Azania | | I have been reading a German book. We must draft a decree at once... Communal physical exercises. ... This is very important. The health of the nation depends on it. | |
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| Supreme Court Of The United States | | Under the Equal Protection clause, not to mention the First Amendment itself, government may not grant the use of a forum to people whose views it finds acceptable, but deny use to those wishing to express less favored or more controversial views. | |
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| Charlton Ogburn, Jr. | | We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization. | |
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| Suso Ohno | | As hard as modern man strives to be free he is a slave chained to the past. | |
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| Revilo P. Oliver | | A theory that a conspiracy has been working consciously for many centuries is not very plausible unless one attributes to them a religious unity. That is tantamount to regarding them as Satanists engaged in the worship and service of supernatural evil. The directors of the conspiracy must see or otherwise directly perceive manifestations which convince them of the existence and power of Lucifer. And since subtle conspirators must be very shrewd men, not likely to be deceived by auto-suggestion, hypnosis, or drugs, we should have to conclude that they probably are in contact with a force of pure evil. | |
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| Walter Olsen | | The paternalist project for our civil courts runs something as follows. After the revolution -- which perhaps has already taken place—the average citizen will enjoy a vast array of wonderful new rights to sue other people. You will be empowered to haul your neighbors and fellow citizens to court if you feel they have fallen short of good faith and fair play. You will be entitled to sue them for unlimited damages, punitive as well as compensatory, even over behavior that had previously been thought not subject to liability at all. Everyone will be under a vague but stringent obligation to look out for your safety and welfare, enforceable by legal action. You will enjoy a cornucopia of contention opportunities, a smorgasbord of suing options, a Lotus-land of litigability. | |
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| Mancur Olson | | Sometimes, when leading families or merchants organized a government for their city, they not only provided for some power sharing through voting but took pains to reduce the probability that the government's chief executive could assume autocratic power. For a time in Genoa, for example, the chief administrator of the government had to be an outsider -- and thus someone with no membership in any of the powerful families in the city. Moreover, he was constrained to a fixed term of office, forced to leave the city after the end of his term, and forbidden from marrying into any of the local families. In Venice, after a doge who attempted to make himself autocrat was beheaded for his offense, subsequent doges were followed in official processions by a sword-bearing symbolic executioner as a reminder of the punishment intended for any leader who attempted to assume dictatorial power. | |
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| Commission On Freedom Of The Press | | The modern press itself is a new phenomenon. Its typical unit is the great agency of mass communication. These agencies can facilitate thought and discussion. They can stifle it…. They can play up or down the news and its significance, foster and feed emotions, create complacent fictions and blind spots, misuse the great words and uphold empty slogans. | |
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| Commission On Freedom Of The Press | | Protection against government is now not enough to guarantee that a man who has something to say shall have a chance to say it. The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public. | |
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| Reverend Edmund Opitz | | If we can revolutionize opinion about social organization so that we can rid ourselves of arbitrary political interventions in economic and social life, we won’t need a world police force; if we can’t change opinion in this area in favor of a strictly limited government, a world police force would either be helpless to prevent war or would be the worst tyranny history has known. | |
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| Rev. Edmund A. Opitz | | No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the
people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited;
the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government
power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the
Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights. | |
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| Rev. Edmund A. Opitz | | There is a place for government in the affairs of men, and our Declaration of Independence tells us precisely what that place is. The role of government is to protect individuals in their God-given individual rights. Freedom is the natural birthright of man, but all that government can do in behalf of freedom is to let the individual alone, and it should secure him in his rights by making others let him alone. | |
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| James Oppenheim | | They can only set free men free ...
And there is no need of that:
Free men set themselves free. | |
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| J. Robert Oppenheimer | | As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress. | |
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| J. Robert Oppenheimer | | There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. | |
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| Oregon Constitution | | In all criminal cases whatever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law, and the facts under the direction of the Court as to the law, and the right of new trials as in civil cases. | |
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| José Ortega y Gasset | | This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State;
that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run
sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies. | |
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| José Ortega y Gasset | | Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort. | |
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| José Ortega y Gasset | | I am I plus my circumstances. | |
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| José Ortega y Gasset | | Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without but an equilibrium which is set up from within. | |
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| George Orwell | | If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. | |
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| George Orwell | | At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts. | |
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| George Orwell | | Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. | |
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| George Orwell | | If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. | |
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| George Orwell | | The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it. | |
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| George Orwell | | Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidarity to pure wind. | |
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| George Orwell | | Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. | |
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| George Orwell (False) | | Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. | |
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| George Orwell | | If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. | |
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| George Orwell | | The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. | |
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| George Orwell | | That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. | |
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| George Orwell | | Freedom is Slavery | |
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| George Orwell | | The ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle, home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics, he feels himself master of his fate. But otherwise he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. | |
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| George Orwell | | It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ... | |
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| George Orwell | | All animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others. | |
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| George Orwell | | Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. | |
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| George Orwell | | The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about. | |
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| George Orwell | | Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. | |
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| George Orwell | | In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. | |
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| George Orwell | | In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. | |
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| George Orwell | | To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle. | |
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| George Orwell | | The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. | |
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| George Orwell | | At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is “not done”… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. | |
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| George Orwell | | If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. | |
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| George Orwell | | If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. | |
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| George Orwell | | Loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature... The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition. | |
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| George Orwell | | Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. | |
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| George Orwell | | The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders. | |
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| George Orwell | | Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. | |
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| George Orwell | | The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it. | |
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| George Orwell | | Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull. | |
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| George Orwell | | The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. | |
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| John Osborne | | Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice. | |
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| Charles Osgood | | Being Politically Correct means always having to say you're sorry. | |
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| James Otis | | There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the Law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free, and they have it ordinarily in their power to make themselves so, if they please. | |
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| James Otis | | Taxation without representation is tyranny. | |
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| James R. Otteson | | If it would be wrong for the government to adopt an official religion, then, for the same reasons, it would be wrong for the government to adopt official education policies. The moral case for freedom of religion stands or falls with that for freedom of education. A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do. | |
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| Ouida | | Petty laws breed great crimes. | |
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| P. D. Ouspensky | | In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes. | |
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| P. D. Ouspensky | | The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm. | |
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| Ovid | | Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these. | |
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| Ovid | | It is annoying to be honest to no purpose. | |
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| Ovid | | Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor. (I see the better way, and approve it; I follow the worse.) | |
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| Candace Owens | | Can anybody point me to that one time in history where the side that was demanding censorship, segregation, propaganda, radical education, papers to move freely in society, plus government forces going door to door to demand compliance were the good guys? | |
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| Count Axel Oxenstierna | | Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed? | |
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| Vance Packard | | The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded. | |
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| Camille Paglia | | It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation. | |
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| Judge James Paine | | Alcohol didn’t cause the high crime rates of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today’s alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does.... Trying to wage war on 23 million Americans who are obviously very committed to certain recreational activities is not going to be any more successful than Prohibition was. | |
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| Thomas Paine | | I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. | |
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| Thomas Paine | | These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated. | |
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| Thomas Paine | | This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still. | |
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| Thomas Paine | | He who dares not offend cannot be honest. | |
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| Thomas Paine | | Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions. | |
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| Thomas Paine | | Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. | |