Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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... we conclude that the [Federal] Reserve Banks are not federal ... but are independent privately owned and locally controlled corporations... without day to day direction from the federal government.
-- 9th Circuit Court		 
No slaves shall keep any arms whatever, nor pass, unless with written orders from his master or employer, or in his company, with arms from one place to another.
-- A Bill Concerning Slaves		 
Under every government the [last] resort of the people, is an appeal to the sword; whether to defend themselves against the open attacks of a foreign enemy, or to check the insidious encroachments of domestic foes.  Whenever a people ... entrust the defence of their country to a regular, standing army, composed of mercenaries, the power of that country will remain under the direction of the most wealthy citizens.
-- A Framer		 
Where the words of a constitution are unambiguous and in their commonly received sense lead to a reasonable conclusion, it should be read according to the natural and most obvious import of the framers, without resorting to subtle and forced construction for the purpose of limiting or extending its operation.
-- A State Ex Rel. Torryson v. Grey		 
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
-- Edward Abbey		 
The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy... If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government—and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.
-- Edward Abbey		 
Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward.
-- Edward Abbey		 
The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.
-- Peter Abelard		 
The limitations imposed by democratic political practices makes it difficult to conduct our foreign affairs in the national interest.
-- Dean Acheson		 
There is simply no escaping the fact that the fate of the Constitution is in our hands -- as voters, representatives, justices. If we allow ourselves to abuse the tradition of higher lawmaking, the very idea that the Constitution can be viewed as the culminating expression of a mobilized citizenry will disintegrate. After all, the American Republic is no more eternal than the Roman -- and it will come to an end when American citizens betray their Constitution’s fundamental ideals and aspirations so thoroughly that existing institutions merely parody the public meanings they formerly conveyed
-- Bruce Ackerman		 
There is simply no escaping the fact that the fate of the Constitution is in our hands -- as voters, representatives, justices. If we allow ourselves to abuse the tradition of higher lawmaking, the very idea that the Constitution can be viewed as the culminating expression of a mobilized citizenry will disintegrate. After all, the American Republic is no more eternal than the Roman -- and it will come to an end when American citizens betray their Constitution’s fundamental ideals and aspirations so thoroughly that existing institutions merely parody the public meanings they formerly conveyed.
-- Bruce Ackerman		 
The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
-- Lord Acton		 
Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
-- Lord Acton		 
Government by idea tends to take in everything, to make the whole of society obedient to the idea. Spaces not so governed are unconquered, beyond the border, unconverted, a future danger.
-- Lord Acton		 
Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime...
-- Lord Acton		 
Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being.
-- Lord Acton		 
And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
-- Lord Acton		 
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
-- Lord Acton		 
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.
-- Lord Acton		 
Learn as much by writing as by reading.
-- Lord Acton		 
I cannot accept, your canon that we are to judge pope and king unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
-- Lord Acton		 
It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.
-- Lord Acton		 
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
-- Lord Acton		 
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities....
-- Lord Acton		 
The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.
-- Lord Acton		 
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
-- Lord Acton		 
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end.
-- Lord Acton		 
Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.
-- Lord Acton		 
Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.
-- Lord Acton		 
Freedom degenerates unless it has to struggle in its own defence.
-- Lord Acton		 
And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
-- Lord Acton		 
We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
-- Abigail Adams		 
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
-- Abigail Adams		 
I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life....Man was made for action and for bustle too, I believe.
-- Abigail Adams		 
Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success as the all-redeeming virtue, the acquisition of wealth as the single worthy aim of life. Ten years ago such revelations as these of the Erie Railway would have sent a shudder through the community, and would have placed a stigma on every man who had had to do them. Now they merely incite others to surpass by yet bolder outrages and more corrupt combinations.
-- Charles Francis Adams		 
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
-- Douglas Adams		 
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
-- Douglas Adams		 
To err is human; to forgive, infrequent.
-- Franklin P. Adams		 
When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.
-- Franklin P. Adams		 
Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.
-- Franklin P. Adams		 
Prohibition is an awful flop.  We like it.  It can't stop what it's meant to stop.  We like it.  It's left a trail of graft and slime, It don't prohibit worth a dime,  It's filled our land with vice and crime.  Nevertheless, we're for it.
-- Franklin P. Adams		 
I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
-- Franklin P. Adams		 
There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country needs is a good five-cent nickel.
-- Franklin P. Adams		 
I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down.
-- Henry Brooks Adams		 
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
-- Henry Brooks Adams		 
Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
-- Henry Brooks Adams		 
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
-- Henry Brooks Adams		 
The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do and dare but freedom from care and worry.
-- James Truslow Adams		 
All good government is and must be republican. But at the same time, you can or will agree with me, that there is not in lexicography a more fraudulent word... Are we not, my friend, in danger of rendering the word republican unpopular in this country by an indiscreet, indeterminate, and equivocal use of it? [...] Whenever I use the word republic with approbation, I mean a government in which the people have collectively, or by representation, an essential share in the sovereignty... the republican forms in Poland and Venice are much worse, and those of Holland and Bern very little better, than the monarchical form in France before the late revolution.
-- John Adams		 
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
-- John Adams		 
They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men.
-- John Adams		 
All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.
-- John Adams		 
Arms in the hands of individual citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defence of the country, the over-throw of tyranny, or in private self-defence .
-- John Adams		 
The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.... And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes.
-- John Adams		 
Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.
-- John Adams		 
The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty.
-- John Adams		 

-- John Adams		 
Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.
-- John Adams		 
The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.
-- John Adams		 
Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws. He is obliged, consequently, to contribute his share to the expense of this protection; and to give his personal service, or an equivalent, when necessary. But no part of the property of any individual can, with justice, be taken from him, or applied to public uses, without his own consent, or that of the representative body of the people. In fine, the people of this commonwealth are not controllable by any other laws than those to which their constitutional representative body have given their consent.
-- John Adams		 
Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.
-- John Adams		 
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
-- John Adams		 
Were I to define the British constitution, therefore, I should say, it is a limited monarchy, or a mixture of the three forms of government commonly known in the schools, reserving as much of the monarchical splendor, the aristocratical independency, and the democratical freedom, as are necessary that each of these powers may have a control, both in legislation and execution, over the other two, for the preservation of the subject's liberty.
-- John Adams		 
There is nothing I dread So much, as a Division of the Republick into two great Parties, each arranged under its Leader, and concerting Measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble Apprehension is to be dreaded as the greatest political Evil, under our Constitution.
-- John Adams		 
If a majority are capable of preferring their own private interest, or that of their families, counties, and party, to that of the nation collectively, some provision must be made in the constitution, in favor of justice, to compel all to respect the common right, the public good, the universal law, in preference to all private and partial considerations... And that the desires of the majority of the people are often for injustice and inhumanity against the minority, is demonstrated by every page of history... To remedy the dangers attendant upon the arbitrary use of power, checks, however multiplied, will scarcely avail without an explicit admission some limitation of the right of the majority to exercise sovereign authority over the individual citizen... In popular governments [democracies], minorities [individuals] constantly run much greater risk of suffering from arbitrary power than in absolute monarchies...
-- John Adams		 
Therefore, the jury have the power of deciding an issue upon a general verdict. And, if they have, is it not an absurdity to suppose that the law would oblige them to find a verdict according to the direction of the court, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience? ... [I]s a juror to give his verdict generally, according to [the judge’s] direction, or even to find the fact specially, and submit the law to the court? Every man, of any feeling or conscience, will answer, no. It is not only his right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.
-- John Adams		 
The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.
-- John Adams		 
Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.
-- John Adams		 
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
-- John Adams		 
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
-- John Adams		 
The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.
-- John Adams		 
(Quotes on 'Republic')
-- John Adams		 

-- John Adams		 
We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact! There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws. It is true, few persons appear desirous to put such laws in execution, and it is also true that some few persons are hardy enough to venture to depart from them. But as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. The substance and essence of Christianity, as I understand it, is eternal and unchangeable, and will bear examination forever, but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination, and they ought to be separated. Adieu.
-- John Adams		 
Were I to define the British constitution, therefore, I should say it is a limited monarchy, or a mixture of the three forms of government commonly known in the schools [monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical] ... And it is [the] reservation of fundamentals, of the right of giving instructions, and of new elections, which creates a popular check, upon the whole government which alone secures the constitution from becoming an aristocracy, or a mixture of monarchy and aristocracy only.
-- John Adams		 
The nature of the encroachment upon American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer; it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole of society.
-- John Adams		 
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.
-- John Adams		 
Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil.
-- John Adams		 
Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil.
-- John Adams		 
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
-- John Adams		 
I answered that the die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon. Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.
-- John Adams		 
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
-- John Adams		 
In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.
-- John Adams		 
A question arises whether all the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, shall be left in this body? I think a people cannot be long free, nor ever happy, whose government is in one Assembly.
-- John Adams		 
Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
-- John Adams		 
The truth is that neither then nor at any former time, since I had attained my maturity in Age, Reading and reflection had I imbibed any general Prejudice against Kings, or in favour of them. It appeared to me then as it has done ever since, that there is a State of Society in which a Republican Government is the best, and in America the only one...
-- John Adams		 
Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.
-- John Adams		 
Our whole system of banks is a violation of every honest principle of banks. There is no honest bank but a bank of deposit. A bank that issues paper at interest is a pickpocket or a robber. But the delusion will have its course. ... An aristocracy is growing out of them that will be as fatal as the feudal barons if unchecked in time.
-- John Adams		 
Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, and measure in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations.
-- John Adams		 
Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone, which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure than they have it now, they may change their rulers and the forms of government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty.
-- John Adams		 
Major Greene this evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the argument he advanced was, "that a mere creature or finite being could not make satisfaction to infinite justice for any crimes," and that "these things are very mysterious." Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.
-- John Adams		 
There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state.
-- John Adams		 
Laws for the liberal education of the youth, especially of the lower class of the people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.
-- John Adams		 
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.
-- John Adams		 
But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.
-- John Adams		 
Spent an hour in the beginning of the evening at Major Gardiner's, where it was thought that the design of Christianity was not to make men good riddle-solvers, or good mystery-mongers, but good men, good magistrates, and good subjects, good husbands and good wives, good parents and good children, good masters and good servants. The following questions may be answered some time or other, namely, — Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring Ecclesiastical Synods? Convocations? Councils? Decrees? Creeds? Confessions? Oaths? Subscriptions? and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion incumbered with in these days?
-- John Adams		 
The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschell’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.
-- John Adams		 
The consequences arising from the continual accumulation of public debts in other countries ought to admonish us to be careful to prevent their growth in our own.
-- John Adams		 
[You have Rights] antecedent to all earthly governments: Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; Rights, derived from the Great Legislator of the universe.
-- John Adams		 
Elections, especially of representatives and counselors, should be annual, there not being in the whole circle of the sciences a maxim more infallible than this, “where annual elections end, there slavery begins.” These great men ... should be (chosen) once a year—Like bubbles on the sea of matter bourne, they rise, they break, and to the sea return. This will teach them the great political virtues of humility, patience, and moderation, without which every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.
-- John Adams		 
Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?
-- John Adams		 
Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"… If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?
-- John Adams		 
A native American who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance...as a comet or an earthquake.
-- John Adams		 
We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest.
-- John Adams		 
It may perhaps be a Sufficient Recommendation of this Article to say that it was introduced by Mr Charles Pinkney of South Carolina, and he ought to have the Glory of it. But I confess I never understood it, and I believe no other Man ever did or ever will. A Republican Government is a Government of more than one. The Word Republick has been used, it is true by learned Men to Signify every actual and every possible Government among Men, that of Constantinople as well as that of Geneva. But the most accurate Writers distinguish Republicks from Despotisms and Simple Monarchies, and call every Government by that name in which more than one Person is concerned in the Sovereignty, and in this Sense the Kingdoms of Sparta Poland and England were Republicks as truely as Saint Marino. Venice Holland and other States were universally called Republicks both by the Learned and unlearned; yet the People in these States had certainly no more Liberty than those of England or France. The most Accurate distinction then has been between free Republicks and Republicks which are not free. It is not even said in our Constitution that the People shall be guarranteed in a Free Republican Government. The Word is So loose and indeffinite that Successive Predominant Factions will put Glosses and Constructions upon it as different as light and darkness, and if ever there should be a Civil War which Heaven forbid, the conquering General in all his Tryumphs may establish a Military Despotism and yet call it a constitutional Republic as Napoleon has already Set him the Example. The only Effect of it that I could ever See, is to deceive the People: and this practice my heart abhors my head disapproves, and my Tongue my Pen have ever avoided.
-- John Adams		 
The dignity and stability of government in all its branches, the morals of the people, and every blessing of society depend so much upon an upright and skillful administration of justice, that the judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, and both should be checks upon that.
-- John Adams		 
Society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.
-- John Adams		 
We should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections.
-- John Adams		 
When I went home to my family in May, 1770, from the town meeting in Boston, which was the first I had ever attended, and where I had been chosen in my absence, without any solicitation, one of their representatives, I said to my wife, "I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning, that you may prepare your mind for your fate." She burst into tears, but instantly cried out in a transport of magnanimity, "Well, I am willing in this cause to run all risks with you, and be ruined with you, if you are ruined." These were times, my friend, in Boston, which tried women's souls as well as men's.
-- John Adams		 
Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would. Nor is there anything in the common law of England ... inconsistent with that right.
-- John Adams		 
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		 
The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole car-loads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.
-- John Adams		 
National defense is one of the cardinal duties of a statesman.
-- John Adams		 
Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty.
-- John Adams		 
Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?
-- John Adams		 
We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.
-- John Adams		 
[N]o good government but what is republican... the very definition of a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men.'
-- John Adams		 
Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.
-- John Adams		 
Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honor, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superior to all private passions.
-- John Adams		 
I Said to my Wife, I have accepted a Seat in the House of Representatives and thereby have consented to my own Ruin to your Ruin and the Ruin of our Children. I give you this Warning that you may prepare your Mind for your Fate.
-- John Adams		 
Every citizen must look up to the laws, as his master, his guardian, and his friend; and whenever any of his fellow citizens, whether magistrates or subjects, attempt to deprive him of his right, he must appeal to the laws; if the aristocracy encroach, he must appeal to the democracy; if they are divided, he must appeal to the monarchical power to decide between them, by joining with that which adheres to the laws; if the democracy is on the scramble for power, he must appeal to the aristocracy, and the monarchy, which by uniting may restrain it. If the regal authority presumes too far, he must appeal to the other two. Without three divisions of power, stationed to watch each other, and compare each other's conduct with the laws, it will be impossible that the laws should at all times preserve their authority, and govern all men.
-- John Adams		 
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		 
The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws, Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe.
-- John Adams		 
[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few.
-- John Adams		 
The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.
-- John Adams		 
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
-- John Adams		 
Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would. Nor is there anything in the common law of England inconsistent with that right.
-- John Adams		 
It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.
-- John Adams		 
Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been on the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!!!" But in this exclamation I would have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean hell.
-- John Adams		 
If Aristotle, Livy, and Harrington knew what a republic was, the British constitution is much more like a republic than an empire. They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men. If this definition is just, the British constitution is nothing more or less than a republic, in which the king is first magistrate. This office being hereditary, and being possessed of such ample and splendid prerogatives, is no objection to the government's being a republic, as long as it is bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend.
-- John Adams		 
When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.
-- John Adams		 
Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest numbers of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.
-- John Adams		 
The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
-- John Adams		 
But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
-- John Adams		 
Laws for the liberal education of the youth, especially of the lower class of the people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.
-- John Adams		 
Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.
-- John Adams		 
[I] never understood [what a republican government was and] I believe no other man ever did or ever will.
-- John Adams		 
Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have... a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean the characters and conduct of their rulers.
-- John Adams		 
I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself.
-- John Adams		 
All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals.
-- John Quincy Adams		 
Posterity -- you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
-- John Quincy Adams		 
But the indissoluble link of union between the people of the several States of this confederated nation is, after all, not in the RIGHT, but in the HEART. If the day should ever come (may Heaven avert it !) when the affections of the people of these States shall be alienated from each other, when the fraternal spirit shall give way to cold indifference, or collision of interests shall fester into hatred, the bonds of political association - will not long hold together parties no longer attracted by the magnetism of conciliated interests and kindly sympathies ; and far better will it be for the people of the disunited States to part in friendship with each other than to be held together by constraint. Then will be the time for reverting to the precedents which occurred at the formation and adoption of the Constitution, to form again a more perfect Union, by dissolving that which could no longer bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to the center.
-- John Quincy 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 laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy.
-- John Quincy Adams		 
Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom.
-- John Quincy Adams		 
Always stand on principle, even if you stand alone.
-- John Quincy Adams		 
Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
-- John Quincy Adams		 
[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
-- John Quincy Adams		 
The highest glory of the American Revolution was this; it connected, in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.
-- John Quincy Adams		 
Law logic -- an artificial system of reasoning, exclusively used in courts of justice, but good for nothing anywhere else.
-- John Quincy Adams		 
Sadly today, much of the political Left has become a hate group. As a hate group, they truly believe they alone have the unique right to censor others, to defame others, even to violently attack and murder others whose speech they don’t like. This is now evident everywhere throughout Leftist culture, including in Hollywood and the Oscars. With Google clearly being run by Leftists, and Facebook run by Leftists, and most of the internet gatekeepers dominated by intolerant Leftists, the shocking realization is that none of us are safe from the hatred, intolerance and censorship of the techno-liberals who tell themselves “the ends justify the means” to silence Trump supporters and defame those who support Trump.
-- Mike Adams		 
Capitalism and communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The communist seeing the rich man and his fine home says, “No man should have so much.” The capitalist seeing the same thing says, “All men should have as much.”
-- Phelps Adams		 
He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people.
-- Samuel Adams		 
A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.
-- Samuel Adams		 
A standing army, however necessary it may be at some times, is always dangerous to the liberties of the people. Such power should be watched with a jealous eye.
-- Samuel Adams		 
How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!
-- Samuel Adams		 
The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.
-- Samuel Adams		 
Let us disappoint the Men who are raising themselves upon the ruin of this Country.
-- Samuel Adams		 
Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum.
-- Samuel Adams		 
In short, it is the greatest Absurdity to suppose it in the Power of one or any Number of Men, at the entering into Society, to renounce their essential natural Rights or the Means of preserving those Rights, when the grand End of civil Government, from the very Nature of its Institution, is for the Support, Protection and Defense of those very Rights: The principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property.
-- Samuel Adams		 
It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions.
-- Samuel Adams		 
How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!
-- Samuel Adams		 
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
-- Samuel Adams		 
Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty!
-- Samuel Adams		 
The Legislative has no Right to absolute arbitrary Power over the Lives and Fortunes of the People: Nor can Mortals assume a Prerogative not only too high for Men but for Angels, and therefore reserv’d for the Exercise of the Deity alone.
-- Samuel Adams		 
If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.
-- Samuel Adams		 
If our Trade be taxed, why not our Lands, or Produce in short, everything we possess? They tax us without having legal representation.
-- Samuel Adams		 
It is always dangerous to the liberties of the people to have an army stationed among them, over which they have no control ... The Militia is composed of free Citizens. There is therefore no danger of their making use of their Power to the destruction of their own Rights, or suffering others to invade them.
-- Samuel Adams		 
Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance. Let us remember that "if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom," it is a very serious consideration ... that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.
-- Samuel Adams		 
All Men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please: And in case of intolerable Oppression, civil or religious, to leave the Society they belong to and enter into another. When Men enter into Society, it is by voluntary Consent, and they have a Right to demand and insist upon the performance of such Conditions and previous Limitations as form an equitable original Compact.
-- Samuel Adams		 
Among the natural Rights of the Colonists are these: First, a Right to Life; secondly, to Liberty; thirdly, to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best Manner they can. Those are evident Branches of, rather than Deductions from, the Duty of Self-Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature.
-- Samuel Adams		 
If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of Almighty God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
-- Samuel Adams		 
Governors have no Right to seek and take what they please; by this, instead of being content with the Station assigned them, that of honorable Servants of the Society, they would soon become Absolute Masters, Despots,and Tyrants. Hence, as a private Man has a Right to say what Wages he will give in his private Affairs, so has a Community to determine what they will give and grant of their Substance for the Administration of public Affairs.
-- Samuel Adams		 
It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.
-- Samuel Adams		 
No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.
-- Samuel Adams		 
Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence be equally enjoyed by all?
-- Samuel Adams		 
The said constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.
-- Samuel Adams		 
And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press,  or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions.
-- Samuel Adams		 
All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they should.
-- Samuel Adams		 
A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty Is worth a whole eternity in bondage.
-- Joseph Addison		 
Clinton realized that America could not economically afford the Protocol Gore negotiated. The Clinton-Gore's Energy Department found Kyoto would lead to $400 billion a year in lost output. ... Gore tries to throw Enron on the back of the current administration. But it was Enron Board Chairman Kenneth Lay who sold Clinton-Gore on Kyoto's cap and trade system. Gore, Clinton, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin met with Lay on Aug. 7, 1997 to go over goals and procedures for the Kyoto session. ... The corporate smoking memo here was not that from an ExxonMobil adviser to oppose Dr. Watson, but the Enron internal memo saying Kyoto 'would do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative'.
-- Ken Adelman		 
A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous.
-- Alfred Adler		 
Dogma is the convictions of one man imposed authoritatively upon others.
-- Felix Adler		 
In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown.
-- Felix Adler		 
Through the rapid proliferation of laws reaching every corner of human existence, “the government is manufacturing more criminals now than ever before.” The list of illegal activities includes more minutiae than one would think possible. Beer-makers are barred from listing alcohol content on bottles, and liquor distilleries cannot advertise on TV. Filling one’s own prairie pothole can land a property owner in jail, as can protecting private property from unlawful intruders. Placing handbills in neighbors’ mailboxes is strictly prohibited, and attempting to sell nectarines of an improper size is a federal offense. Companies are no longer allowed to give salaried professionals partial days off without pay, and in Texas it is a crime to call oneself an interior designer without the government’s permission. It is perhaps easier to recount all that remains legal than all that is now prohibited.
-- Jonathan H. Adler		 
Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.
-- Mortimer Adler		 
Do you think someone who is about to rape you is going to stop and think about a condom?
-- Eli Adorno		 
I would far rather be ignorant than wise in the foreboding of evil.
-- Aeschylus		 
Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny.
-- Aeschylus		 
Time as he grows old teaches all things.
-- Aeschylus		 
Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might.
-- Aeschylus		 
In war, truth is the first casualty.
-- Aeschylus		 
Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.
-- Aeschylus		 
Only when man's life comes to its end in prosperity can one call that man happy.
-- Aeschylus		 
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope
-- Aeschylus		 
It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.
-- Aeschylus		 
For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends.
-- Aeschylus		 
It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow.
-- Aesop		 
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.
-- Aesop		 
The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.
-- Aesop		 
Better to starve free than be a fat slave.
-- Aesop		 
The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.
-- Aesop		 
The gods help them that help themselves.
-- Aesop		 
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
-- Aesop		 
Familiarity breeds contempt.
-- Aesop		 

-- Aesop		 
Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything.
-- Aesop		 
Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.
-- Aesop		 
Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.
-- Aesop		 
Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction.
-- Aesop		 
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
-- Aesop		 
While I see many hoof marks going in, I see none coming out. It is easier to get into the enemy's toils than out again.
-- Aesop		 
Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.
-- Aesop		 
Union gives strength.
-- Aesop		 
I will have nought to do with a man who can blow hot and cold with the same breath.
-- Aesop		 
Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth.
-- Aesop		 
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.
-- Aesop		 
Vices are their own punishment.
-- Aesop		 
A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
-- Aesop		 
Appearances often are deceiving.
-- Aesop		 
Slow and steady wins the race.
-- Aesop		 
We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.
-- Aesop		 
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
-- Aesop		 
People often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.
-- Aesop		 
Thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find - nothing.
-- Aesop		 
In fact, nothing is said that has not been said before.
-- Publius Terentius Afer		 
I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself.
-- Publius Terentius Afer		 
Charity begins at home.
-- Publius Terentius Afer		 
Moderation in all things.
-- Publius Terentius Afer		 
Fortune helps the brave.
-- Publius Terentius Afer		 
I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want.
-- Publius Terentius Afer		 
Don't look where you fall, but where you slipped.
-- African Proverb		 
Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.
-- African Proverb		 
The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
-- Herbert Sebastien Agar		 
The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.
-- Spiro Agnew		 
If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.
-- Spiro Agnew		 
Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression, and the leaders of various media professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me. That happens to be my amendment, too. It guarantees my free speech as it does their freedom of the press… There is room for all of us – and for our divergent views – under the First Amendment.
-- Spiro Agnew		 
[A] deep-rooted culture of incompetence and corruption has made it virtually impossible for government to function fairly and efficiently. And because most government employees are shielded by layers of protection, they couldn't care less. Never before in the history of this nation has there been a greater divide between a self-serving federal leviathan and millions of Americans... 'Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,' Ronald Reagan reminded us during his inaugural address in 1981. Nothing's changed since then, with one exception: It's gotten far worse.
-- Arnold Ahlert		 
From a “pragmatic” point of view, political philosophy is a monster, and whenever it has been taken seriously, the consequence, almost invariably, has been revolution, war, and eventually, the police state.
-- Henry David Aiken		 
The news is like a ship. If you take hands off the wheel, it pulls hard to the left.
-- Roger Ailes		 
That the sole object and only legitimate end of government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression.
-- Alabama, Declaration of Rights Article I Section 35		 
Flowers don't open to the clock but to the sunshine spontaneous;for modern humans that manner of instinct is now extraneous.
-- Astrid Alauda		 
People have become as processed as food.
-- Astrid Alauda		 
The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.
-- Thomas Bailey Aldrich		 
We now have so many regulations that everyone is guilty of some violation.
-- Donald Alexander		 
Chief among the spoils of victory is the privilege of writing the history.
-- Mark Alexander		 
It is precisely this clinging to victimhood as a means of demonstrating one’s virtue and advancing one’s well-being that has led us into a society in which welfare and quotas are “civil rights,” government handouts are “entitlements,” and payment to girls having babies out of wedlock are “compassionate,” while hard-working, ambitious people are “greedy,” punishment of crime is “oppression,” and an independent thinker who stands for courage and self-reliance is dismissed as an “Uncle Tom.”
-- J. Tucker Alford		 
It is precisely this clinging to victimhood as a means of demonstrating one’s virtue and advancing one’s well-being that has led us into a society in which welfare and quotas are “civil rights,” government handouts are “entitlements,” and payment to girls having babies out of wedlock are “compassionate,” while hard-working, ambitious people are “greedy,” punishment of crime is “oppression,” and an independent thinker who stands for courage and self-reliance is dismissed as an “Uncle Tom.”
-- J. Tucker Alford		 
The man who has no imagination has no wings.
-- Mohammed Ali		 
The man who views the world at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.
-- Mohammed Ali		 
Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips, but few in their mind.
-- Dante Alighieri		 
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
-- Dante Alighieri		 
Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips but few in their minds.
-- Dante Alighieri		 
How to create a socialist state by Saul Alinsky:\\ There are 8 levels of control that must be obtained before you are able to create a socialist state. The first is the most important.\\\\ 1) Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people.\\ 2) Poverty — Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.\\ 3) Debt — Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.\\ 4) Gun Control — Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.\\ 5) Welfare — Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income).\\ 6) Education — Take control of what people read and listen to — take control of what children learn in school.\\ 7) Religion — Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.\\ 8) Class Warfare — Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.\\
-- Saul Alinksy		 
A free and open society is an ongoing conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises.
-- Saul Alinsky		 
Do whatever you can to capture, or recapture, your life spark - unless it harms others, in which case suffer with as much happiness as you can muster.  Your nobility of spirit will spark itself.
-- Corri Alius		 
There is not anything, which has contributed so much to delude mankind in religious matters, as mistaken apprehensions concerning supernatural inspiration or revelation; not considering that all true religion originates from reason, and cannot otherwise be understood, but by the exercise and improvement of it.
-- Ethan Allen		 
Liberty cannot be caged into a charter or handed on ready-made to the next generation. Each generation must recreate liberty for its own times. Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves.
-- Florence Ellinwood Allen		 
We believe the picture painters of the mass media are artfully creating landscapes for us which deliberately hide the real picture. In this book we will show you how to discover the "hidden picture" in the landscapes presented to us daily through newspapers, radio and television.
-- Gary Allen		 
After the insiders have established the United Socialist States of America (in fact if not in name), the next step is the Great Merger of all nations of the world into a dictatorial world government. … The Insiders’ code word for the world superstate is “new world order,” a phrase often used by Richard Nixon. The Council on Foreign Relations states in its Study No. 7: “The U.S. must strive to: A. BUILD A NEW INTERNATIONAL ORDER.” … A world government has always been the object of the Communists.
-- Gary Allen		 
By the time the (16th) Amendment had been approved by the states, the Rockefeller Foundation was in full operation...about the same time that Judge Kenesaw Landis was ordering the breakup of the Standard Oil monopoly...John D...not only avoided taxes by creating four great tax-exempt foundations; he used them as repositories for his 'divested' interests...made his assets non-taxable so that they might be passed down through generations without...estate and gift taxes...Each year the Rockefellers can dump up to half their incomes into their pet foundations and deduct the "donations" from their income tax.
-- Gary Allen		 
If one understands that Socialism is not a “share the wealth” program but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super rich men promoting Socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately Socialism, is not a movement of the down-trodden masses but of the economic elite.
-- Gary Allen		 
Reporters today are far removed from America's founding values and are alarmed and contemptuous of gun owners as dangerous lower classes.
-- Henry Allen		 
Circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him.
-- James Allen		 
Our life is what our thoughts make it. A man will find that as he alters his thoughts toward things and other people, things and others will alter towards him.
-- James Allen		 
The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.
-- Joseph Allen		 
Congress is continually appointing fact-finding committees, when what we really need are some fact-facing committees.
-- Roger Allen		 
If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss Bank.
-- Woody Allen		 
I call the mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master [and] receives new truth as an angel from Heaven.
-- Woody Allen		 
We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice.
-- Woody Allen		 
The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won't get much sleep.
-- Woody Allen		 
The artist, viewing his fellows through his personal vision, has through the ages attempted to portray what he sees and to present his understanding of it. Censorship in his case has perpetrated heavy and sometimes reprehensible blunders.
-- Hollis Alpert		 
History is replete with examples of empires mounting impressive military campaigns on the cusp of their impending economic collapse.
-- Eric Alterman		 
Freedom of thought and freedom of speech in our great institutions are absolutely necessary for the preservation of our country. The moment either is restricted, liberty begins to wither and die...
-- John Peter Altgeld		 
I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
-- Lisa Alther		 
The ultimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to “the people,” not the “states.” As the language of the Tenth Amendment shows, these two are of course not identical and when the Constitution means “states” it says so. Thus, ... “the people” at the core of the Second Amendment are the same “people” at the heart of the Preamble and the First Amendment, namely Citizens.... Nowadays, it is quite common to speak loosely of the National Guard as “the state militia,” but ... the “militia” is identical to “the people” in the core sense described above.
-- Akhil Reed Amar		 
It is the duty of the officials to prevent or suppress the threatened disorder with a firm hand instead of timidly yielding to threats…. Surely a speaker ought not to be suppressed because his opponents propose to use violence. It is they who should suffer from their lawlessness, not he.
-- American Bar Association		 
I shall not counsel or maintain any suit or proceeding which shall appear to me to be unjust, nor any defense except such as I believe to be honestly debatable under the law of the land.
-- American Bar Association		 
Liberty is always unfinished business.
-- American Civil Liberties Union		 
There are many Americans who fear for their lives. They know that at some point, they will have to protect themselves, their own families, and their own property. Should these people be disarmed? No, we don’t need to disarm our loyal citizens, our friends, and our neighbors.
-- American Federation of Police		 
The International government of the United Nations, stripped of its legal trimming, then, is really the International Government of the United States and the Soviet Union acting in unison.
-- American Jewish Committee’s Magazine		 
Daniel Webster, James Otis, and Sir Edward Coke all pointed out that the mere fact of enactment does not and cannot raise mere statutes to the standing of law. Not everything can be considered the Law of the Land.
-- American Jurisprudence (Second)		 
No one is bound to obey an unconstitutional law, and no courts are bound to enforce it.
-- American Jurisprudence, 2nd Edition		 
We believe that free communication is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture.
-- American Library Association		 
Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access of all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored.
-- American Library Association		 
The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack… These actions apparently arise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals.
-- American Library Association		 
Why is Intellectual Freedom Important? Intellectual freedom is the basis of our democratic system. We expect our people to be self-governors. But to do so responsibly, our citizenry must be well informed. Libraries provide the ideas and information, in a variety of formats, to allow people to inform themselves.
-- American Library Association		 
We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe.
-- American Library Association		 
The invisible Money Power is working to control and enslave mankind. It financed Communism, Fascism, Marxism, Zionism and Socialism. All of these are directed to making the United States a member of World Government.
-- American Mercury Magazine		 
Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.
-- Oscar Ameringer		 
We are, heart and soul, friends to the freedom of the press. It is however, the prostituted companion of liberty, and somehow or other, we know not how, its efficient auxiliary. It follows the substance like its shade; but while a man walks erect, he may observe that his shadow is almost always in the dirt. It corrupts, it deceives, it inflames. It strips virtue of her honors, and lends to faction its wildfire and its poisoned arms, and in the end is its own enemy and the usurper's ally, It would be easy to enlarge on its evils. They are in England, they are here, they are everywhere. It is a precious pest, and a necessary mischief, and there would be no liberty without it.
-- Fisher Ames		 
Liberty has never lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism.
-- Fisher Ames		 
Mr. Madison has introduced his long expected amendments... The rights of conscience, of bearing arms, of changing the government, are declared to be inherent in the people.
-- Fisher Ames		 
I am commonly opposed to those who modestly assume the rank of champions of liberty, and make a very patriotic noise about the people. It is the stale artifice which has duped the world a thousand times, and yet, though detected, it is still successful. I love liberty as well as anybody. I am proud of it, as the true title of our people to distinction above others; but ... I would guard it by making the laws strong enough to protect it.
-- Fisher Ames		 
The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.
-- Fisher Ames		 
We are not to consider ourselves, while here, as at church or school, to listen to the harangues of speculative piety; we are here to talk of the political interests committed to our charge.
-- Fisher Ames		 
[O]ur sages in the great [constitutional] convention... intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often... oppress only a few, but it is the very essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country.
-- Fisher Ames		 
Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent.
-- Fisher Ames		 
The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be liberty.
-- Fisher Ames		 
The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man that it forms.
-- Henri-Frédéric Amiel		 
Liberty, equality -- bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness.
-- Henri-Frédéric Amiel		 
Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel		 
Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means to push back a boundary-line and adding to one's liberty.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel		 
The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel		 
The USA was founded in the name of democracy, equality and individual freedom, but is failing to deliver the fundamental promise of protecting rights for all.
-- Amnesty International		 
If the legislature clearly misinterprets a constitutional provision, the frequent repetition of the wrong will not create a right.
-- Amos v. Mosley		 
If the legislature clearly misinterprets a Constitutional provision, the frequent repetition of the wrong will not create a right.
-- Amos v. Mosley		 
Early in 1979, I and several other young nurses from my ward were summoned to a mass meeting. All sixty-odd of us were young married women who had not yet been sterilized. Secretary Wang arrived and took up a position in front of the assembly. His round little face, normally the picture of conviviality, was set in an expression of the utmost gravity. 'Today we have a matter of extreme urgency,' he began, 'a toudeng dashi, to discuss. It concerns the population of the motherland. The People's Republic of China has within its borders nearly a billion people, or one-fifth of the world's population. This is a big burden for the people's government. ... Having children is not a question that we can afford to let each family, each household, decide for itself. ... It is a question that should be decided at the national level. China is a socialist country. This means that the interests of the individual must be subordinated to the interests of the state. Where there is conflict between the interests of the state in reducing population and the interests of the individual in having children, it must be resolved in favor of the state.'
-- Chi An		 
These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.
-- Anacharsis		 
The forum [is] an established place for men to cheat one another, and behave covetously.
-- Anacharsis		 

-- xRecording Police and Public Officials		 
Indeed, the U.N. is the main Soviet espionage center in this country.
-- Jack Anderson		 
I'm not apologising, I'm saying I'm sorry, which is quite different.
-- Jessica Anderson		 
Paradise is just like where you are right now, only much better.
-- Laurie Anderson		 
When a government takes over a people’s economic life it becomes absolute, and when it has become absolute it destroys the arts, the minds, the liberties and the meaning of the people it governs.
-- Maxwell Anderson		 
The Original Sin which brought us to the brink of bankruptcy and dictatorship was the Federal Income Tax Amendment and its illegitimate child, Federal Aid.
-- Tom Anderson		 
Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.
-- Walter Truett Anderson		 
The intellectually stifling results of censorship -- while deplorable in any setting -- would be all the more abominable if allowed to exist within the college environment.
-- William M. Anderson, Jr.		 
I don't like the income tax. Every time we talk about these taxes we get around to the idea of 'from each according to his capacity and to each according to his needs'. That's socialism. It's written into the Communist Manifesto. Maybe we ought to see that every person who gets a tax return receives a copy of the Communist Manifesto with it so he can see what's happening to him.
-- T. Coleman Andrews		 
The modern banking system manufactures “money” out of nothing; and the process is, perhaps, the most, astounding piece of “sleight of hand” that was ever invented. In fact, it was not invented. It merely “grew”. ... Banks in fact are able to create (and cancel) modern “deposit money”, just as much as they were originally able to create, or call in, their own original forms of private notes. They can, in fact, inflate and deflate, i.e., mint, and un-mint the modern “ledger-entry” currency.
-- Major L. L. B. Angas		 
The one who throws the stone forgets; the one who is hit remembers forever.
-- Angolan Proverb		 
The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don’t adjust! Revolt against the reality!
-- Mordechai Anielewicz		 
All and everybody, this is my claim, fifty feet on the gulch, cordin to Clear Creek District Law, backed up by shotgun amendments.
-- Anonymous Gold Miner		 
Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men.
-- Harry J. Anslinger		 
There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.
-- Harry J. Anslinger		 
You smoke a joint and you're likely to kill your brother.
-- Harry J. Anslinger		 
...the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.
-- Harry J. Anslinger		 
Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers. Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others. It is a drug that causes insanity, criminality, and death -- the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.
-- Harry J. Anslinger		 
Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing.
-- Harry J. Anslinger		 
Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.
-- Harry J. Anslinger		 
Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.
-- Harry J. Anslinger		 
I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.
-- Susan B. Anthony		 
Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.
-- Susan B. Anthony		 
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.
-- Susan B. Anthony		 
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus		 
Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus		 
The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong-doer.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus		 
A man should be upright, not be kept upright.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus		 
Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
-- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus		 
Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.
-- Saint Thomas Aquinas		 
Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them.
-- Saint Thomas Aquinas		 
The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.
-- Saint Thomas Aquinas		 
In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign.... Secondly, a just cause.... Thirdly ... a rightful intention.
-- Saint Thomas Aquinas		 
If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship he would keep it in port forever.
-- Thomas Aquinas		 
Choose your friends carefully. Your enemies will choose you.
-- Yassir Arafat		 
We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend 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.
-- Gaius Petronius Arbiter (False)		 
The first step to truly living a good and fearless life, is accepting responsibility for your actions. Accepting what part you had in any situation. Difficult, to say the least, but liberating.
-- Jann Arden		 
In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.
-- Hannah Arendt		 
No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
-- Hannah Arendt		 
The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.
-- Hannah Arendt		 
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
-- Hannah Arendt		 
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
-- Hannah Arendt		 
What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
-- Hannah Arendt		 
The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been foreseen. We don’t know the future but everybody acts into the future. Nobody knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done by a “we” and not an “I.” Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell the consequences of what I’m doing. What actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history. Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history -- or at least history since the Middle Ages -- had no other aim than Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?
-- Hannah Arendt		 
Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how, Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behavior. They learn whom to kill and how to kill and how to do it together. This is the much talked about Gleichschaltung—the coordination process. You are coordinated not with the powers that be, but with your neighbor—coordinated with the majority. But instead of communicating with the other you are now glued to him. And you feel of course marvelous. Totalitarianism appeals to the very dangerous emotional needs of people who live in complete isolation and in fear of one another.
-- Hannah Arendt		 
Thus far of the leadership of the National Council of Churches of Christ in America, we have found over 100 persons in leadership capacity with either communist-front records or records of service to communist causes. The aggregate affiliations of the leadership, instead of being in the hundreds as first indicated, is now, according to the latest count, into the thousands, and we have yet to complete our check, which would certainly suggest, on the basis of authoritative sources of this committee, that the statement that there is infiltration of fellow travelers in churches and educational institutions is a complete understatement.
-- Richard Arens		 
I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself.
-- Pietro Aretino		 
You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
-- Aristophanes		 
Under every stone lurks a politician.
-- Aristophanes		 
The wise learn many things from their enemies.
-- Aristophanes		 
The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.
-- Aristotle		 
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
-- Aristotle		 
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.
-- Aristotle		 
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
-- Aristotle		 
A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments.
-- Aristotle		 
Education is the best provision for old age.
-- Aristotle		 
Democracy arose from men thinking that if they are equal in any respect they are equal in all respects.
-- Aristotle		 
The three aims of the tyrant are, one, the humiliation of his subjects; he knows that a mean-spirited man will not conspire against anybody; two, the creation of mistrust among them; for a tyrant is not to be overthrown until men begin to have confidence in one another -- and this is the reason why tyrants are at war with the good; they are under the idea that their power is endangered by them, not only because they will not be ruled despotically, but also because they are too loyal to one another and to other men, and do not inform against one another or against other men -- three, the tyrant desires that all his subjects shall be incapable of action, for no one attempts what is impossible and they will not attempt to overthrow a tyranny if they are powerless.
-- Aristotle		 
The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.
-- Aristotle		 
It is the greatest inequality to try to make unequal things equal.
-- Aristotle		 
For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends.
-- Aristotle		 
Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil -- and if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty.
-- Aristotle		 
To the size of the state there is a limit, as there is to plants, animals and implements, for none of these retain their facility when they are too large.
-- Aristotle		 
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit
-- Aristotle (False)		 
Both Oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of arms.
-- Aristotle		 
Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
-- Aristotle		 
What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others.
-- Aristotle		 
The end of labor is to gain leisure.
-- Aristotle		 
The basis of a democratic state is liberty.
-- Aristotle		 
Man is by nature a political animal.
-- Aristotle		 
The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.
-- Aristotle		 
It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man, or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done.
-- Aristotle		 
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious.
-- Aristotle		 
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
-- Aristotle		 
It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-- Aristotle		 
Dignity does not come in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
-- Aristotle		 
What then, is he protected in the right to keep and thus use? Not every thing that may be useful for offense or defense, but what may properly be included or understood under the title of “arms,” taken in connection with the fact that the citizen is to keep them, as a citizen. Such, then as are found to make up the usual arms of the citizen of the country, and the use of which will properly train and render him efficient in defense of his own liberties, as well as of the State. Under this head, with a knowledge of the habits of our people, and of the arms in the use of which a soldier should be trained, we hold that the rifle, of all descriptions, the shot gun, the musket and repeater, are such arms, and that, under the Constitution, the right to keep such arms cannot be infringed or forbidden by the legislature.
-- Arkansas Supreme Court		 
The people themselves, not their government, should be trusted with spending their own money and making their own decisions.
-- Richard Armey		 
Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision.
-- Richard Armey		 
[T]he tax code has been piling up, year after year, a symbol of everything gone wrong in America, of arrogant rulers and lost freedom, just waiting for us to pick the whole thing up and heave it away. It has to happen. Free people can put up with such laws only for so long.
-- Richard Armey		 
Government is saying to the average citizen every January 1: 'For the next five months you’ll be working for us, for goals we shall determine. Is that clear? After May 5 you may look after your own needs and ambitions, but report back to us next January. Now move along.' ... If nearly half of what you make is spent by someone else, that means that half your work time is spent working for someone else. Call me a radical, but I think that comes dangerously close to being a form of indentured servitude.
-- Richard Armey		 
...[W]e insist on the principle that no danger or crisis, foreign or domestic, will be solved by Americans surrendering more of their constitutional liberties, in the foolish hope that a bigger government will provide greater security.
-- Larry P. Arnn		 
Hillsdale [College] forgoes government money in order to spare our students, faculty and administrators the bureaucratic interference that is the price of accepting federal financial support.
-- Larry P. Arnn		 
The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
-- Matthew Arnold		 
Believe me, it is not failing to speak out with promptitude and energy that is the matter with you; it is having nothing consistent or valuable to say.
-- Matthew Arnold		 
But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok'd souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will.
-- Matthew Arnold		 
It is a part of the function of “law” to give recognition to ideas representing the exact opposite of established conduct. Most of the complications arise from the necessity of pretending to do one thing, while actually doing another.
-- Thurman Arnold		 
The spectacle of a judge pouring over the picture of some nude, trying to ascertain the extent to which she arouses prurient interests, and then attempting to write an opinion which explains the difference between that nude and some other nude has elements of low comedy.
-- Thurman Arnold		 
[The US has] developed two coordinate governing classes: the one, called ‘business,' building cities, manufacturing and distributing goods, and holding complete and autocratic power over the livelihood of millions; the other, called ‘government,' concerned with preaching and exemplification of spiritual ideals, so caught in a mass of theory, that when it wished to move in a practical world it had to do so by means of a sub rosa political machine.
-- Thurman Arnold		 
If honor be your clothing, the suit will last a lifetime; but if clothing be your honor, it will soon be worn threadbare.
-- William D. Arnot		 
Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?
-- Stephen Arons		 
To those who scare peace loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.
-- John Ashcroft		 
True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others, at whatever cost.
-- Arthur Ashe		 
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
-- Isaac Asimov		 
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
-- Isaac Asimov		 
Politically popular speech has always been protected: even the Jews were free to say ‘Heil Hitler.’
-- Isaac Asimov		 
Politically popular speech has always been protected: even the Jews were free to say ‘Heil Hitler.’
-- Isaac Asimov		 
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right.
-- Isaac Asimov		 
If living conditions don't stop improving in this country, we're going to run out of humble beginnings for our great men.
-- Russell P. Askue		 
What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.
-- Margot Asquith		 
'Parent choice' proceeds from the belief that the purpose of education is to provide individual students with an education. In fact, educating the individual is but a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order to which individuals contribute and by which they are sustained. 'Family choice' is, therefore, basically selfish and anti-social in that it focuses on the 'wants' of a single family rather than the 'needs' of society.
-- Association of California School Administrators		 
The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.
-- Assyrian Tablet		 
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
-- Nancy Astor		 
1. Our military is supposed to be a means to an end: national security.  Due to its immense size and colossal budget, has our military not become an end as well as a means? 2. In World War II, Americans could explain “Why We Fight” in part because the government provided a clear and compelling rationale for war.  Why are the goals of today’s wars so opaque to most Americans? 3. If our military provides us with our way of “nation building” abroad, won’t countries and peoples be more likely to copy our military ways and weaponry than our democratic teachings?  4. America is facing painful budgetary belt tightening.  Why is the military immune? 5. Why does “support our troops” seemingly end when they leave the service, leading us to tolerate such inequities as an unemployment rate of 21% for young veterans?
-- William J. Astore		 
When it comes to our nation's military affairs, ignorance is not bliss.  What's remarkable then, given the permanent state of war in which we find ourselves, is how many Americans seem content not to know.
-- William J. Astore		 
It's true that the world is a dangerous place. The problem is that the Pentagon is part of that danger. Our military has grown so strong and so dominates our government, including its foreign policy and even aspects of our culture, that there's no effective counterweight to its closeted, conflict-centered style of thinking.
-- William J. Astore		 
If some people had wings and others didn't, and the government wanted to enforce "fairness," soon no one would have wings. Because wings cannot be redistributed, they can only be broken. Likewise, a government edict cannot make people smarter or more capable, but it can impede the growth of those with the potential. Wouldn't it be fair if, in the name of equality, we scar the beautiful, cripple the athletes, lobotomize the scientists, blind the artists, and sever the hands of the musicians? Why not?
-- Oleg Atbashian		 
Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.
-- Clement Atlee		 
The use of “religion” as an excuse to repress the freedom of expression and to deny human rights is not confined to any country or time.
-- Margaret Atwood		 
Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.
-- W. H. Auden		 
Liberty is from God; liberties, from the devil.
-- Berthold Auerbach		 
Near our vineyard there was a pear tree laden with fruit that was not attractive in either flavor or form. One night, when I [at the age of sixteen] had played until dark on the sandlot with some other juvenile delinquents, we went to shake that tree and carry off its fruit. From it we carried off huge loads, not to feast on, but to throw to the pigs, although we did eat a few ourselves. We did it just because it was forbidden.
-- Saint Augustine		 
An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”
-- Saint Augustine		 
Give me chastity and self-restraint, but do not give it yet.
-- Saint Augustine		 
Though defensive violence will always be 'a sad necessity' in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men.
-- St. Augustine		 
Put no faith in salvation through the political order.
-- Augustine of Hippo		 
I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.
-- Caesar Augustus		 
The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution in spirit, the forces which had produced inequities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, and fear.
-- Aung San Suu Kyi		 
Life is a banquet - and most poor suckers are starving.
-- Auntie Mame		 
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
-- Marcus Aurelius		 
The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.
-- Marcus Aurelius		 
He who has seen present things has seen all, both everything which has taken place from all eternity and everything which will be for time without end; for all things are of one kin and of one form.
-- Marcus Aurelius		 
Once the government becomes the supplier of people's needs, there is no limit to the needs that will be claimed as a basic right.
-- Lawrence Auster		 
Let me point this out now. Your income tax is 100 percent voluntary tax, and your liquor tax is 100 percent enforced tax. Now, the situation is as different as night and day. Consequently, your same rules just will not apply...
-- Dwight E. Avis		 
The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.
-- Bill Ayers		 
The whole subject of civilians carrying guns for self defense is discussed too much in the wrong places -- ACLU cocktail parties, gun club gatherings -- all placid atmospheres far removed from the terrifying reality of violent confrontation with the lawless. It should be discussed in prisons, where professional criminals are remarkably candid about their avoidance of armed citizens who can fight back. It should be discussed in rape crises centers. Ask a woman who has been raped, whether she ever wished she had a gun when it happened ... and whether she had bought one since. Her reply is likely to be “yes” to at least the first, and often to both. Talk to the bereaved who lost their loved ones to the streets. Talk to those who have been violated in their homes. Ask them how they feel about passive non-resistance. And when you have attuned yourself to the haunting fear that lives with them forever after their nightmare, you will be ready to talk with someone else who was in their place, but survived unscathed because they were armed. The contrast will be striking. These survivors don’t put notches on their pistols, and they don’t brag about what they had to do... The taking of a human life, no matter what the circumstances, is an unnatural act, an emotionally shattering experience that leaves its own scars forever. But none of those people regret what they did, and to a man, their first reaction was to go home to their wife and children and hug them, tightly and wordlessly.
-- Massad Ayoob		 
Aside from the most committed libertarians, few Americans would list a lack of freedom in their lives as their most pressing concern. That is not to deny that militant leftism, the administrative state, and the imperial judiciary threaten liberty—they most emphatically do. Nor is it to argue that conservatives should not care for liberty. Rather it is to recognize that the average American, including the average Republican voter, is not a libertarian, has come to expect quite a lot from the federal government, and cares as much, if not more, about security than liberty (or opportunity for that matter, unless he is young and on the make).
-- David Azerrad		 
There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.
-- Richard Bach		 
There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.
-- Richard Bach		 
All governments are more or less combinations against the people...and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled...the power of government can only be kept within its constituted bounds by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected sentiment of the people.
-- Benjamin Franklin Bache		 
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
-- Francis Bacon		 
Men prefer to believe what they prefer to be true.
-- Francis Bacon		 
So when any of the four pillars of government, are mainly shaken, or weakened (which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather.
-- Francis Bacon		 
Nay, number itself in armies importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for, as Virgil saith, 'It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.'
-- Francis Bacon		 
...for that nothing doth more hurt in a state, than that cunning men pass for wise.
-- Francis Bacon		 
Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
-- Francis Bacon		 
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
-- Francis Bacon		 
For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence, and things mean and splendid exist alike.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
Knowledge is power.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
Knowledge and human power are synonymous.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they see nothing but sea.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
One of the Seven [wise men of Greece] was wont to say: That laws were like cobwebs, where the small flies are caught and the great break through.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man’s knowledge.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty, or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man's self.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
-- Sir Francis Bacon		 
There are in fact four very significant stumblingblocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge.
-- Roger Bacon		 
Allow me to dispel a myth. People in the Middle East do not hate us for our freedom. They do not hate us for our lifestyle. They hate us because we have spent many years attempting to force them to emulate our lifestyle. The US government overthrew the democratically elected leader of Iran and replaced him with the Shah. The US government gave weapons, intelligence and money to Saddam Hussein. The US government also helped Libyan Col. Qaddafi come to power, propped up the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian regime, and gave assistance to Osama bin Laden. Most Americans have forgotten these events. But the people of the Middle East will always remember. It was because of American troops in Saudi Arabia, lethal sanctions on Iraq, support for states in serious violation of International Law, and siding with Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians that terrorist leaders were able to recruit those individuals who caused 3,000 Americans to pay the ultimate price on September 11, 2001.
-- Michael Badnarik		 
How bad do things have to get before you do something? Do they have to take away all your property? Do they have to license every activity that you want to engage in? Do they have to start throwing you on cattle cars before you say “now wait a minute, I don’t think this is a good idea.” How long is it going to be before you finally resist and say “No, I will not comply. Period!” Ask yourself now because sooner or later you are going to come to that line, and when they cross it, you’re going to say well now cross this line; ok now cross that line; ok now cross this line. Pretty soon you’re in a corner. Sooner or later you’ve got to stand your ground whether anybody else does or not. That is what liberty is all about.
-- Michael Badnarik		 
The Democrats and Republicans stand at two extremes, characterized by which parts of our lives they emphasize their desire to control.  Libertarians reject both extremes in favor of the government leaving control of your life to you.
-- Michael Badnarik		 
I have the right to do whatever I wish with my property. If I own a pile of wood, I can set fire to it even if it is currently nailed together in the shape of a barn. Cigarettes may not be healthy for me in the long run, but I have the freedom to smoke them anyway. Drinking alcohol may or may not have negative side effects, but even if it does, the government has no authority to prohibit you from consuming it, even if it is "in your own best interest." Since when do we let the government decide what is or isn't good for us? What the hell does Congress know about nutrition, anyway? (For that matter, what does Congress know about the Constitution?) If the government can use force whenever something is "in our best interest" then government should force everyone to wake up at 6am every morning for calisthenics in the front yard. Fast food establishments should be torn down and replaced with bars that serve carrot juice and alfalfa sprouts, since - "it's in your best interest." This paternalistic attitude that "the government knows best" and that you are merely a helpless child is insulting and reprehensible. Hitler used the same attitude to persuade the Germans to subjugate themselves to the "Fatherland.
-- Michael Badnarik		 
If I give you a forty five percent chance at lethal injection, a fifty percent chance at the electric chair, and a five percent chance for escape which are you going to vote for? The electric chair, because you're likely to win?
-- Michael Badnarik		 
Letting a maximum number of views be heard regularly is not just a nice philosophical notion. It is the best way any society has yet discovered to detect maladjustments quickly, to correct injustices, and to discover new ways to meet our continuing stream of novel problems that rise in a changing environment.
-- Ben H. Bagdikian		 
In the US, voters cast ballots for individual candidates who are not bound to any party program except rhetorically, and not always then. Some Republicans are more liberal than some Democrats, some libertarians are more radical than some socialists, and many local candidates run without any party identification. No American citizen can vote intelligently without knowledge of the ideas, political background, and commitments of each individual candidate.
-- Ben H. Bagdikian		 
So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience tells them it is wrong.
-- Walter Bagehot		 
A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.
-- Walter Bagehot		 
The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank.
-- Walter Bagehot		 
Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.
-- Walter Bagehot		 
The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes.
-- Carl Friedrich Bahrdt		 
Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee.
-- F. Lee Bailey		 
The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.
-- Gil Bailie		 
The freedom allowed in the United States to all sorts of inquiry and discussion necessarily leads to a diversity of opinion, which is seen not only in there being different denominations, but different opinions also in the same denomination.
-- Robert Baird		 
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
-- Russell Baker		 
The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation -- which speculates upon the labor of people - will always find the means for its existence.
-- Mikhail Bakunin		 
Intellectual slavery, of whatever nature it may be, will always have as a natural result both political and social slavery.
-- Mikhail A. Bakunin		 
The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights.
-- Mikhail A. Bakunin		 
Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him.
-- Mikhail A. Bakunin		 
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
-- Mikhail A. Bakunin		 
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
-- James Baldwin		 
Freedom is not something that can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
-- James Baldwin		 
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
-- James Baldwin		 
I am for socialism, disarmament, and ultimately, for abolishing the state itself. … Communism is the goal.
-- Roger Baldwin		 
I joined. I don’t regret being a part of the Communist tactic, which increased the effectiveness of a good cause. I knew what I was doing. I was not an innocent liberal. I wanted what the Communists wanted.
-- Roger Baldwin		 
The power of authority is never more subtle and effective than when it produces a psychological “atmosphere” or “climate” favorable to the life of certain modes of belief, unfavorable, and even fatal, to the life of others.
-- Arthur Balfour		 
In fact, the big corporations who understand the regulatory game can actually benefit from it. They can lobby for expensive regulations only the largest corporations can afford, effectively keeping upstarts and competitors at bay.
-- Radley Balko		 
Weary the path that does not challenge. Doubt is an incentive to truth and patient inquiry leadeth the way.
-- Hosea Ballou		 
The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.
-- Hosea Ballou		 
Madison, agreeing with the journal of the convention, records that the grant of power to emit bills of credit was refused by a majority of more than four to one. The evidence is perfect; no power to emit paper money was granted to the legislature of the United States.
-- George Bancroft		 
Gun control has proved to be a grievous failure, a means of disarming honest citizens without limiting firepower available to those who prey on the law-abiding. Attempting to use the legal system to punish the weapon rather than the person misusing the weapon is similarly doomed to fail.
-- Doug Bandow		 
[E]conomic liberty and creative entrepreneurship are the basis of any solution to today’s social and economic difficulties. Blaming business, setting wages, and attempting to run the economy by decree from Washington only exacerbates the problems. Consider the minimum wage. It seems so simple: Tell business to pay its workers more. But a hike in the minimum wage is essentially a tax, punishing precisely those companies that hire workers with the least skills.
-- Doug Bandow		 
[R]eal charity doesn’t mean giving away someone else’s money.
-- Doug Bandow		 
Being paid by the government to shelve books in a library, whether as an employee or as an Americorps member, is no more laudable or valuable than being paid by Crown Books to stock bookshelves in a bookstore. A host of private-sector jobs provide enormous public benefits—consider health care professionals, medical and scientific researchers, entrepreneurs, inventors, and artists. Many of these people earn less than they could in alternative work; they have chosen to serve in their own way. Yet government programs that equate public employment with service to society effectively denigrate service through private employment.
-- Doug Bandow		 
The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government’s assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors’ needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior.
-- Doug Bandow		 
The Internal Revenue Service is everything the so-called tax protesters said it was; nonresponsive, unable to withstand scrutiny, tyrannical, and oblivious to the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution.
-- Joseph Banister		 
Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it.
-- Tallulah Bankhead		 
Cocaine habit forming? Of course not. I ought to know, I've been using it for years.
-- Tallulah Bankhead		 
I'm a foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.
-- Tallulah Bankhead		 
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
-- Imamu Amiri Baraka		 
Freedom all solace to man gives: He lives at ease that freely lives.
-- John Barbour		 
Self-defense is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself.
-- William Barclay		 
The tree of liberty could not grow were it not watered with the blood of tyrants.
-- Bertrand Barere de Vieuzac		 
In terms of altering sociological patterns, free speech, rather than being the enemy, is a long-tested and worthy ally. To deny free speech in order to engineer social changes in the name of accomplishing a greater good for one sector of our society erodes the freedoms of all.
-- Sarah Evans Barker		 
To permit every interest group, especially those who claim to be victimized by unfair expression, their own legislative exceptions to the First Amendment so long as they succeed in obtaining a majority of legislative votes in their favor demonstrates the potentially predatory nature of what defendants seek through this Ordinance.
-- Sarah Evans Barker		 
What I'd like to see police do is deal with important issues and not these sorts of victimless crimes when society is riddled with problems.
-- Alderman Rodney Barket		 
I have great sympathy for the oppressed but I do not expect them to be morally superior to the oppressors. I merely expect them to be oppressed.
-- Jerome Barkow		 
[Individual disarmament] palsies the hand and brutalizes the mind; an habitual disuse of physical force totally destroys the moral; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression.
-- Joel Barlow		 
I don't believe medical discoveries are doing much to advance human life. As fast as we create ways to extend it we are inventing ways to shorten it.
-- Christiaan Barnard		 
I will not dwell on all the bitter results of new secular age. Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery. And yet, the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy. Among these militant secularists are many so-called “progressives.” But where is the progress? We are told we are living in a post-Christian era. But what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system? What is it that can fill the spiritual void in the hearts of the individual person? And, what is a system of values that can sustain human social life? The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.
-- William Barr		 
In the past, when societies are threatened by moral chaos, the overall social costs of licentiousness and irresponsible personal conduct becomes so high that society ultimately recoils and reevaluates the path they are on. But today – in the face of all the increasing pathologies – instead of addressing the underlying cause, we have the State in the role of Alleviator of Bad Consequences. We call on the State to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility. So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion. The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites. The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the State to set itself up as the ersatz husband for single mothers and the ersatz father to their children. The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with the wreckage. While we think we are solving problems, we are underwriting them. We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on whom we depend.
-- William Barr		 
One of the ironies, as some have observed, is that the secular project has itself become a religion, pursued with religious fervor. It is taking on all the trappings of a religion – including inquisitions and excommunication. Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake – social, educational, and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social media campaigns.
-- William Barr		 
In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.
-- William Barr		 
The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of ‘Resistance’ against this Administration, it is the Left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law. This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have always had in contesting the political issues of the day. It was adverted to by the old, curmudgeonly Federalist, Fisher Ames, in an essay during the early years of the Republic.
-- William Barr		 
It is easier to run away from a local tyranny than a national one. … [I]f it is one size fits all – if every congressional enactment or Supreme Court decision establishes a single rule for every American – then the stakes are very high as to what that rule is.
-- William Barr		 
When the entire press ‘advances along the same track,’ as Tocqueville put it, the relationship between the press and the energized majority becomes mutually reinforcing. Not only does it become easier for the press to mobilize a majority, but the mobilized majority becomes more powerful and overweening with the press as its ally. This is not a positive cycle, and I think it is fair to say that it puts the press’s role as a breakwater for the tyranny of the majority in jeopardy. The key to restoring the press in that vital role is to cultivate a greater diversity of voices in the media.
-- William Barr		 
Today in the United States, the corporate – or ‘mainstream’ – press is massively consolidated. And it has become remarkably monolithic in viewpoint, at the same time that an increasing number of journalists see themselves less as objective reporters of the facts, and more as agents of change.
-- William Barr		 
Although totalitarian democracy is democratic in form, it requires an all-knowing elite to guide the masses toward their determined end, and that elite relies on whipping up mass enthusiasm to preserve its power and achieve its goals. Totalitarian democracy is almost always secular and materialistic, and its adherents tend to treat politics as a substitute for religion. Their sacred mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society according to an abstract ideal of perfection.
-- William Barr		 
These developments have given the press an unprecedented ability to mobilize a broad segment of the public on a national scale and direct that opinion in a particular direction.
-- William Barr		 
The Framers would have seen a one-size-fits-all government for hundreds of millions of diverse citizens as being utterly unworkable and a straight road to tyranny. That is because they recognized that not every community is exactly the same. What works in Brooklyn might not be a good fit for Birmingham. The federal system allows for this diversity. It also enables people who do not like a certain system to move to a different one.
-- William Barr		 
Youth will be served, every dog has his day and mine has been a fine one.
-- George Barrow		 
No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
-- Dave Barry		 
As a taxpayer, you are required to be fully in compliance with the United States Tax Code, which is currently the size and weight of the Budweiser Clydesdales.
-- Dave Barry		 
The best way to understand this whole issue is to look at what the government does: it takes money from some people, keeps a bunch of it, and gives the rest to other people.
-- Dave Barry		 
The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and time again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.
-- Dave Barry		 
I promise you a police car on every sidewalk.
-- Mayor Marion Barry		 
The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity during this long period of increment weather.
-- Mayor Marion Barry		 
What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary?
-- Mayor Marion Barry		 
I am making this trip to Africa because Washington is an international city, just like Tokyo, Nigeria or Israel. As mayor, I am an international symbol. Can you deny that to Africa?
-- Mayor Marion Barry		 
If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very, very low crime rate.
-- Mayor Marion Barry		 
A man must pay the fiddler. In my case it so happened that a whole symphony orchestra often had to be subsidized.
-- John Barrymore		 
Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims.
-- Alan Barth		 
The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free – which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.
-- Alan Barth		 
Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.
-- Alan Barth		 
Historically, it has been Big Business, not consumers or progressives, who have been primarily responsible for creating most government regulatory agencies. ... Indeed, virtually all regulatory agencies have had the effect of limiting entry and competition in the industries they oversee.
-- Bruce Bartlett		 
Democrats will play the old Washington game of calling reductions in the rate of growth of spending for any program a 'cut'.
-- Bruce Bartlett		 
Freedom is not caprice but room to enlarge.
-- Cyrus Augustus Bartol		 
What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage.
-- Bruce Barton		 
Nothing did more to spur the boom in stocks than the decision made by the New York Federal Reserve bank, in the spring of 1927, to cut the rediscount rate. Benjamin Strong, Governor of the bank, was chief advocate of this unwise measure, which was taken largely at the behest of Montagu Norman of the Bank of England....At the time of the Banks action I warned of its consequences....I felt that sooner or later the market had to break.
-- Bernard Baruch		 
Taxation with representation ain't so hot either.
-- Gerald Barzan		 
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.
-- Matsuo Basho		 
Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways; hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And it the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim -- when he defends himself -- as a criminal.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
-- Frédéric Bastiat		 
When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because the law makes them so.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
If every person has the right to defend -- even by force -- his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right -- its reason for existing, its lawfulness -- is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
They would be the shepherds over us, their sheep. Certainly such an arrangement presupposes that they are naturally superior to the rest of us. And certainly we are fully justified in demanding from the legislators and organizers proof of this natural superiority.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
All you have to do, is to see whether the law takes from some what belongs to them in order to give it to others to whom it does not belong. We must see whether the law performs, for the profit of one citizen and to the detriment of others, an act which that citizen could not perform himself without being guilty of a crime. Repeal such a law without delay. ... [I]f you don’t take care, what begins by being an exception tends to become general, to multiply itself, and to develop into a veritable system.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
It must be admitted that the tendency of the human race toward liberty is largely thwarted, especially in France. This is greatly due to a fatal desire -- learned from the teachings of antiquity -- that our writers on public affairs have in common: They desire to set themselves above mankind in order to arrange, organize, and regulate it according to their fancy.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
The war against illegal plunder has been fought since the beginning of the world. But how is... legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay ... If such a law is not abolished immediately it will spread, multiply and develop into a system.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter -- by peaceful or revolutionary means -- into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
What, then, is the law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense. ... since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force -- for the same reason -- cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individual groups. ... But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
As long as the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting to gain access to the legislature as well as fighting within it.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
A Fatal Tendency of Mankind. Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing. But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man -- in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Society is composed of men, and every man is a FREE agent. Since man is free, he can choose; since he can choose, he can err; since he can err, he can suffer. I go further: He must err and he must suffer; for his starting point is ignorance, and in his ignorance he sees before him an infinite number of unknown roads, all of which save one lead to error.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
No legal plunder: This is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate).
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Life, faculties, production -- in other words, individuality, liberty, property -- this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation and are superior to it.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve... But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
And what is this liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world? Is it not the union of all liberties -- liberty of conscience, of education, of association, of the press, of travel, of labor, of trade?
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Thus, if there exists a law which sanctions slavery or monopoly, oppression or robbery, in any form whatever, it must not even be mentioned. For how can it be mentioned without damaging the respect which it inspires? Still further, morality and political economy must be taught from the point of view of this law; from the supposition that it must be a just law merely because it is a law. Another effect of this tragic perversion of the law is that it gives an exaggerated importance to political passions and conflicts, and to politics in general.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism -- including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense; of punishing injustice?
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its purpose is to protect persons and property.... If you exceed this proper limit -- if you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, or artistic -- you will then be lost in uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it on you.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
Socialists desire to practice legal plunder, not illegal plunder. Socialists, like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon. And when once the law is on the side of socialism, how can it be used against socialism? For when plunder is abetted by the law, it does not fear your courts, your gendarmes, and your prisons. Rather, it may call upon them for help.
-- Frederic Bastiat		 
[Natural rights are] moral claims to those spheres of action which are necessary for the welfare of the individual and the development of his personality.
-- Miner Searle Bates		 
Why don’t we just legalize drugs? ... The day that it is legalized in the United States, it will lose value. And if it loses value, there will be no profit. But as long as the U.S. citizenry doesn’t rise up to do something, they will pass this life fighting and fighting.
-- Dr. Jorge Batlle		 
One of the hardest things to teach a child is that the truth is more important than the consequences.
-- O. A. Battista		 
The devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!
-- Charles Baudelaire		 
The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.
-- Charles Baudelaire		 
The crucial point is precisely there: in this total counter-meaning to Good and Evil in Western philosophy, the philosophy of Enlightenment. We naively believe that the progress of the Good, its rise in all domains (sciences, techniques, democracy, human rights) correspond to a defeat of Evil. Nobody seems to understand that Good and Evil rise simultaneously, and in the same movement. The triumph of the One does not produce the erasure of the Other.
-- Jean Baudrillard		 
What's right with America is a willingness to discuss what's wrong with America.
-- Harry C. Bauer		 
The country's first drug ban explicitly targeted the opium of "the heathen Chinee." Cocaine was first banned in the south to prevent an uprising of hopped-up "cocainized Negroes.
-- Dan Baum		 
The [Supreme] Court during the past decade let police obtain search warrants on the strength of anonymous tips. It did away with the need for warrants when police want to search luggage, trash cans, car interiors, bus passengers, fenced private property and barns.
-- Dan Baum		 
The Supreme Court is steadily eroding the protections against police excess promised by the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
-- Dan Baum		 
It's gotten to where defense attorneys in federal drug cases can do their clients about as much good as Dr. Kevorkian can do his -- quietly shepherd them through to the least painful end.
-- Dan Baum		 
Religious liberty is the chief cornerstone of the American system of government, and provisions for its security are embedded in the written charter and interwoven in the moral fabric of its laws. Anything that tends to invade a right so essential and sacred must be carefully guarded against, and I am satisfied that my countrymen, ever mindful of the suffering and sacrifices necessary to obtain it, will never consent to its impairment for any reason or under any pretext whatsoever.
-- Thomas F. Bayard		 
Members of society must obey the law because they personally believe that its commands are justified.
-- Judge David Bazelon		 
My own view rests on the premise that nullification can and should serve an important function in the criminal process ... The doctrine permits the jury to bear on the criminal process a sense of fairness and particularized justice ... The drafters of legal rules cannot anticipate and take account of every case where a defendant’s conduct is “unlawful” but not blameworthy, any more than they can draw a bold line to mark the boundary between an accident and negligence. It is the jury -- as spokesmen for the community’s sense of values -- that must explore that subtle and elusive boundary. ... I do not see any reason to assume that jurors will make rampantly abusive use of their power. Trust in the jury is, after all, one of the cornerstones of our entire criminal jurisprudence, and if that trust is without foundation we must reexamine a great deal more than just the nullification doctrine.
-- Chief Judge David L. Bazelon		 
Nullification is not a "defense" recognized by law, but rather a mechanism that permits a jury, as community conscience, to disregard the strict requirements of law where it finds that those requirements cannot justly be applied in a particular case.
-- David L. Bazelon		 
Those who support the death tax generally do so not for economic reasons but for political ones. They want to make the tax code 'fair' by taxing away the lifetime wealth of others.
-- William Beach		 
Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not.
-- Elias Root Beadle		 
So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television's a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business... We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion.
-- Howard Beale		 
One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.
-- Charles Austin Beard		 
The Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations … intend to prevent, if they can, a repetition of what they call in the vernacular “the debunking journalistic campaign following World War I.” Translated into precise English, this means that the Foundation and the Council do not want journalists or any other persons to examine too closely and criticize too freely the official propaganda and official statements relative to “our basic aims and activities” during World War II. In short, they hope that, among other things, the policies and measures of Franklin D. Roosevelt will escape in the coming years the critical analysis, evaluation and exposition that befell the policies and measures of Woodrow Wilson and the Entente Allies after World War I.
-- Charles Austin Beard		 
As long as I don't write about the government, religion, politics, and other institutions, I am free to print anything.
-- Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais		 
Provided I do not write about the government, or about religion, or politics, or morals, or those in power, or public bodies, or the Opera, or the other state theatres, or about anybody who is active in anything, I can print whatever I want.
-- Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais		 
The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.
-- Cesare Beccaria		 
False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction.
-- Cesare Beccaria		 
The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful.
-- Cesare Beccaria		 
For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes.
-- Cesare Beccaria		 
A principal source of errors and injustice are false ideas of utility. For example: that legislator has false ideas of utility who considers particular more than general conveniencies, who had rather command the sentiments of mankind than excite them, who dares say to reason, 'Be thou a slave;' who would sacrifice a thousand real advantages to the fear of an imaginary or trifling inconvenience; who would deprive men of the use of fire for fear of their being burnt, and of water for fear of their being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it.
-- Cesare Beccaria		 
False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty... and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.
-- Cesare Beccaria		 
If a theory and its proponents stubbornly refuse falsification by an ever increasing body of substantial conflicting evidence, the theory degenerates into a textbook example of dogmatic pseudo-science. The neo-Darwinian theory of macroevolution has failed on all fronts, from mathematical feasibility, to theoretical plausibility and explanatory power, to empirical support.
-- Günter Bechly		 
We used to be a free people. Now we are hedged in by millions of laws. Harassed by a plague of opportunistic lawyers. Harmed by regulations meant for our protection. Unnecessarily taxed to pay for a suffocating bureaucracy. Drowning in petty paperwork. Stifled by “rights” that rarely benefit anyone.
-- Joan Beck		 
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
-- Samuel Beckett		 
The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors.
-- Henry Becque		 
Government should allow persons to engage in whatever conduct they want to, no matter how deviant or abnormal it may be, so long as (a) they know what they are doing, (b) they consent to it, and (c) no one -- at least no one other than the participants -- is harmed by it.
-- Hugo Adam Bedau		 
We are more especially called upon to maintain the principles of free discussion in case of unpopular sentiments or persons, as in no other case will any effort to maintain them be needed.
-- Edward Beecher		 
There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.
-- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher		 
Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them.
-- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher		 
Liberty is the soul's right to breathe and, when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.
-- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher		 
A bird in a cage is not half a bird.
-- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher		 
The worst thing in this world, next to anarchy, is government.
-- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher		 
The tidal wave of God's providence is carrying liberty throughout the globe.
-- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher		 
There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what the winds are to oceans...and where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast.
-- Rev. Henry Ward Beecher		 
No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.
-- Lyman Beecher		 
Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool.
-- Paul Begala		 
Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.
-- Clive Bell		 
History is clear that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted to secure certain common law rights of the people, against invasion by the Federal Government.
-- Bell v. Hood		 
I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.
-- Rev. Francis Bellamy		 
To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
-- Cardnial Robert Bellarmine		 
In a recent conversation with an official at the Internal Revenue Service, I was amazed when he told me that 'If the taxpayers of this country ever discover that the IRS operates on 90% bluff the entire system will collapse' .
-- Henry Bellmon		 
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
-- Hilaire Belloc		 
[Heresy is] the dislocation of a complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein.
-- Hilaire Belloc		 
Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be bought at the price of liberty.
-- Hilaire Belloc		 
Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.
-- Saul Bellow		 
I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but if I had to choose, I would prefer that to their being educated by the state.
-- Max Victor Belz		 
Politics is the art of looking for trouble,finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
-- Ernest Benn		 
Pursue what catches your heart, not what catches your eyes.
-- Roy T. Bennett		 
Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution.
-- W. Lance Bennett		 
If America is destroyed, it may be by Americans who salute the flag, sing the national anthem, march in patriotic parades, cheer Fourth of July speakers – normally good Americans, but Americans who fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free, Americans who have been lulled away into a false security.
-- Ezra Taft Benson		 
You cannot do wrong and feel right. It is impossible!
-- Ezra Taft Benson		 
No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.
-- Jeremy Bentham		 
As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends.
-- Jeremy Bentham		 
Among the several cloudy appellatives which have been commonly employed as cloaks for misgovernment, there is none more conspicuous in this atmosphere of illusion than the word Order.
-- Jeremy Bentham		 
As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.
-- Jeremy Bentham		 
Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed.
-- Bernard Berenson		 
Usurpation, the exercise of power not granted, is not legitimized by repetition.
-- Raoul Berger		 
The average taxpayer in Germany or Japan pays less for the defense of his country than the average taxpayer in America pays for the defense of Germany or Japan.
-- David Bergland		 
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
-- Henri-Louis Bergson		 
Given a short time with a psycho-politician you can alter forever the loyalty of a soldier in our hands or a statesman or a leader in his own country, or you can destroy his mind... (more)
-- Lavrentii Pavlovich Beria		 
He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.
-- George Berkeley		 
I thank God, we have not free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both!
-- Sir William Berkeley		 
Political correctness is really a subjective list put together by the few to rule the many -- a list of things one must think, say, or do. It affronts the right of the individual to establish his or her own beliefs.
-- Mark Berley		 
Purveyors of political correctness will, in the final analysis, not even allow others their judgments... They celebrate “difference,” but they will not allow people truly to be different -- to think differently, and to say what they think.
-- Mark Berley		 
Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance -- these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.
-- Isaiah Berlin		 
Conformities are called for much more eagerly today than yesterday... skeptics, liberals, individuals with a taste for private life and their own inner standards of behavior, are objects of fear and derision and targets of persecution for either side... in the great ideological wars of our time.
-- Isaiah Berlin		 
Those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an unalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human.
-- Isaiah Berlin		 
All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.
-- Isaiah Berlin		 
The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.
-- Isaiah Berlin		 
But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you – the social reformers – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
-- Isaiah Berlin		 
Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery.
-- Georges Bernanos		 
Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
-- Georges Bernanos		 
The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
-- Georges Bernanos		 
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
-- Edward Bernays		 
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
-- Edward Bernays		 
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
-- Edward L. Bernays		 
In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business or in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.
-- Edward L. Bernays		 
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.
-- Edward L. Bernays		 
Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of.
-- Edward L. Bernays		 
In order to get the truth, conflicting arguments and expression must be allowed. There can be no freedom without choice, no sound choice without knowledge.
-- David K. Berninghausen		 
For the first time in history, the rational and the good are fully armed in the battle against evil. Here we finally find the answer to our paradox; now we can understand the nature of the social power held by evil. Ultimately, the evil, the irrational, truly has no power. The evil men’s control of morality is transient; it lives on borrowed time made possible only by the errors of the good. In time, as more honest men grasp the truth, evil’s stranglehold will be easily broken.
-- Andrew Bernstein		 
Altruism demands that an individual serve others, but doesn’t stipulate whether those others should be one’s family, or the homeless, or society as a whole. Collectivism states that, in politics, society comes first and the individual must obey.  Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics.
-- Andrew Bernstein		 
Statism – the subordination of the individual to the state --  leads inevitably to the most hideous oppression.
-- Andrew Bernstein		 
Collectivism is the political theory that states that the will of the people is omnipotent, an individual must obey; that society as a whole, not the individual, is the unit of moral value. ... Collectivism is the application of the altruist ethics to politics.
-- Andrew Bernstein		 
I would not be fooled by the old myth that reporting is about objectivity. Deciding what is news is the most subjective of acts and it is probably the most important thing that we do.
-- Carl Bernstein		 
The whole point of the liberal revolution that gave rise to the 1960’s was to free us from somebody else’s dogma, but now the same people…are striving to impose on others a secularized religion…disguising it behind innocuous labels like ‘diversity training’ and ‘respect for difference.’
-- Richard Bernstein		 
It's never over 'till it's over.
-- Yogi Berra		 
If you don't know where you're going, when you get there you'll be lost.
-- Yogi Berra		 
Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
-- Yogi Berra		 
If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
-- Yogi Berra		 
I don't know a more irreligious attitude, one more utterly bankrupt of any human content, than one which permits childred to be destroyed.
-- Daniel Berrigan		 
But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of truth? And more urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?
-- Daniel Joseph Berrigan		 
If your library is not ‘unsafe’, it probably isn’t doing its job.
-- John Berry		 
What a valuable tool food aid can be in changing behaviour. ... food is power. ... Yes, it's bribery. We don't apologize for that.
-- Catherine Bertini		 
Let's have no illusions. We can't easily change the underlying beliefs and prejudices that do so much damage to women worldwide. We cannot quickly change attitudes, but we can change behaviour. At the World Food Programme we have recognized what a valuable tool food aid can be in changing behaviour. In so many poorer countries food is money, food is power. In some of our most successful food aid projects, we literally pay families who do not believe in educating their daughters to send those girls to school. A little free cooking oil can go a long way. We trade a 5 litre can of oil for 30 days of school attendance by a young girl. Yes, it's bribery. We don't apologize for that. We are changing behaviour, we are giving hope and opportunity to young girls and that is all that counts. Each small change in behaviour will one day pay off in a change in attitude.
-- Catherine Bertini		 
Tolerance is the eager and glad acceptance of the way along which others seek the truth.
-- Sir Walter Besant		 
It is wrong to take half or more of what people earn; wrong to force some people to pay for the support of others, threatening them with jail if they refuse (are in “noncompliance”).
-- Tom Bethel		 
No Gulag, evidently, can deter the advocates of state power from believing in their own virtue and in the morality of the power they exercise. We are all Hobbesians now. Virtue is presumed to reside in the state. Its reliance on compulsion is seen as fulfilling, not undermining, morality. Our communicators, oddly employed in the private sector, work tirelessly to ensure that state control is maintained, our taxes stay high, the official message is promoted. The people know, and can only know, a tiny fraction of what Leviathan does, and what they know is what these partisans tell them.
-- Tom Bethel		 
No government has ever commanded the resources at the disposal of our ungodly Leviathan, which consumes about 25 percent of the product of the world’s richest country. It is driven by a voracious alliance of government’s own employees, and those who receive benefits from the state. At least 90 million Americans either depend directly on government handouts or jobs, and each private worker must support not only himself and his family, but also carry a government worker on his shoulders.
-- Tom Bethel		 
If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves. We should, therefore, protest openly everything ... that smacks of discrimination or slander.
-- Mary McLeod Bethune		 
This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence -- but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.
-- Bruno Bettelheim		 
If liberty is worth keeping and free representative government worth saving, we must stand for all American fundamentals—not some, but all. All are woven into the great fabric of our national well-being. We cannot hold fast to some only, and abandon others that, for the moment, we find inconvenient. If one American fundamental is prostrated, others in the end will surely fall.
-- Albert J. Beveridge		 
Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so.
-- Albert J. Beveridge		 
America would be better off as a country and Americans happier and more prosperous as a people if half of our government boards, bureaus, and commissions were Abolished, hundreds of thousands of our government officials, agents and employees were discharged, and two-thirds of our government regulations, restrictions, inhibitions were removed.
-- Albert J. Beveridge		 
A newspaper has three things to do. One is to amuse, another is to entertain and the rest is to mislead.
-- Ernest Bevin		 
You know all what I'm about to, what I've said, and you know what I've done, and you know what we're doing, and you know -- I know what you're doing.
-- Joe Biden		 
Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation to the rest of the society.  Throughout history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrificed for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was a moral revolution.  It was a moral revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being, his property, his happiness became central to our values, and thatis what really made America unique.  People came here from all over the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place.
-- Robert Bidinotto		 
Republicans don't know how to defend morally an individual's right to achieve wealth and to keep it, and that is why they fail. ... It's part and parcel with their ambivalence over the individualist heritage of the nation. ... One of the things that people have to understand is that the American Revolution was truly an epic revolution in the way individuals were perceived in relation to the rest of the society.  Throughout history individuals had always been cogs in some machine; they'd always been something to be sacrificed for the king, the tribe, the gang, the chieftain, the society around them, the race, whatever, and the real revolution, in America especially, was a moral revolution.  It was a moral revolution in that ... suddenly, with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the individual, his life, his well-being, his property, his happiness became central to our values, and that is what really made America unique.  People came here from all over the world to try to escape the kind of oppression they had and experienced in the past. They came here for freedom; they came here for self-expression and self-realization, and America offered them that kind of a place.
-- Robert Bidinotto		 
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
Vote: The instrument and symbol of a free man's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
Optimism: The doctrine that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. ... It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the government from running amuck by hamstringing it.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
As records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind... Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
Heathen, n. A benighten creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.
-- Ambrose Bierce		 
What ISN'T in the news is often more important than what IS.
-- Ed Biersmith		 
Blessings of the state, blessings of the masses. ... Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents, and be happy.
-- Big Brother		 
Let us revise our views and work from the premise that all laws should be for the welfare of society as a whole and not directed at the punishment of sins.
-- John Biggs, Jr.		 
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
-- Steve Biko		 
Our U.S. government each year spends roughly 30 percent more money than it takes in. It took 39 Presidents and 200 years to accumulate a debt of $1 trillion dollars. But it has taken only the past 12 years for that debt to triple to more than $5.9 trillion. Interest payments on the deficit alone add up to more than what our government pays for unemployment compensation, veteran's benefits, postal operations, housing, education, and highways combined. Saddled with this tremendous burden, it is impossible for our businesses to invest, harder for families to afford homes and medical care, and difficult for the United States to play its role in matters of national and international economic security.
-- James Bilbray		 
The freedom of speech, and debates or proceedings in Parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.
-- The English Bill Of Rights		 
The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so.
-- Josh Billings		 
Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess, and yet all the honesty in the world ain't lawful tender for a loaf of bread.
-- Josh Billings		 
Under our form of government, the legislature is not supreme ... like other departments of government, it can only exercise such powers as have been delegated to it, and when it steps beyond that boundary, its acts, like those of the most humble magistrate in the state who transcends his jurisdiction, are utterly void.
-- Billings v. Hall		 
Intellectual and cultural freedom is the most important single precondition for the breakdown of the kinds of tyrannical and totalitarian systems that periodically threaten us.
-- James Billington		 
Whatever power you give to the good cops, goes to the bad ones, too. Never forget that.
-- Phillip J. Birmingham		 
The Federal Reserve Bank is nothing but a banking fraud and an unlawful crime against civilization. Why? Because they "create" the money made out of nothing, and our Uncle Sap Government issues their "Federal Reserve Notes" and stamps our Government approval with NO obligation whatever from these Federal Reserve Banks, Individual Banks or National Banks, etc.
-- H. L. Birum, Sr.		 
A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who’d rather write a good story.
-- Jim Bishop		 
The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
-- Jim Bishop		 
A national government is a government of the people of a single state or nation, united as a community by what is termed the 'social compact,’ and possessing complete and perfect supremacy over persons and things, so far as they can be made the lawful objects of civil government. A federal government is distinguished from a national government by its being the government of a community of independent and sovereign states, united by compact.
-- Black's Law Dictionary		 
Militia: The body of citizens in a state, enrolled for discipline as a military force, but not engaged in actual service except in emergencies, as distinguished from regular troops or a standing army.
-- Black's Law Dictionary, 3rd Edition		 
What a government of limited powers needs, at the beginning and forever, is some means of satisfying the people that it has taken all steps humanly possible to stay within its powers. That is the condition of its legitimacy, and its legitimacy, in the long run, is the condition of its life.
-- Charles L. Black, Jr.		 
Liberty, whether natural, civil, or political, is the lawful power in the individual to exercise his corresponding rights. It is greatly favored in law.
-- Henry Campbell Black		 
What finally emerges from the ‘clear and present danger’ cases is a working principle that the substantive evil must be extremely serious and the degree of imminence extremely high before utterances can be punished…It must be taken as a command of the broadest scope that explicit language, read in the context of a liberty-loving society, will allow.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
The layman’s constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn’t like is unconstitutional.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
Freedom to publish means freedom for all and not for some. Freedom to publish is guaranteed by the constitution but freedom to continue to prevent others from publishing is not.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
Compelling a man by law to pay his money to elect candidates or advocate law or doctrines he is against differs only in degree, if at all, from compelling him by law to speak for a candidate, a party, or a cause he is against. The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
The first ten amendments were proposed and adopted largely because of fear that Government might unduly interfere with prized individual liberties. The people wanted and demanded a Bill of Rights written into their Constitution. The amendments embodying the Bill of Rights were intended to curb all branches of the Federal Government in the fields touched by the amendments—Legislative, Executive, and Judicial.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
The interest of the people lies in being able to join organizations, advocate causes, and make political “mistakes” without being subjected to governmental penalties.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
... any broad unlimited power to hold laws unconstitutional because they offend what this Court conceives to be the ‘conscience of our people’ ... was not given by the Framers, but rather has been bestowed on the Court by the Court.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they express, or the words they speak or write.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the First Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
Compelling a man by law to pay his money to elect candidates or advocate law or doctrines he is against differs only in degree, if at all, from compelling him by law to speak for a candidate, a party, or a cause he is against. The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
The United States has a system of taxation by confession.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
It is my belief that there are “absolutes” in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what the words meant and meant their prohibitions to be "absolutes.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
The Press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
[I]t is true that [the provisions of the Bill of Rights] were designed to meet ancient evils. But they are the same kind of human evils that have emerged from century to century whenever excessive power is sought by the few at the expense of the many.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize the oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all... It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
In my judgment the people of no nation can lose their liberty so long as a Bill of Rights like ours survives and its basic purposes are conscientiously interpreted, enforced and respected so as to afford continuous protection against old, as well as new, devices and practices which might thwart those purposes. I fear to see the consequences of the Court's practice of substituting its own concepts of decency and fundamental justice for the language of the Bill of Rights as its point of departure in interpreting and enforcing that Bill of Rights.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges’ views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice. I have no fear of constitutional amendments properly adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution by judges under the guise of interpretation.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
Among the religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, ethical culture, secular humanism and others.
-- Justice Hugo L. Black		 
By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech.
-- Harry A. Blackmun		 
And, lastly, to vindicate these rights, when actually violated and attacked, the subjects of England are entitled, in the first place, to the regular administration and free course of justice in the courts of law; next to the right of petitioning the king and parliament for redress of grievances; and, lastly, to the right of having and using arms for self preservation and defense.
-- Sir William Blackstone		 
The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights.
-- Sir William Blackstone		 
That the king can do no wrong is a necessary and fundamental principle of the English constitution.
-- Sir William Blackstone		 
It is better ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.
-- Sir William Blackstone		 
[Self-defense is] justly called the primary law of nature, so it is not, neither can it be in fact, taken away by the laws of society.
-- Sir William Blackstone		 
Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery.
-- Lawana Blackwell		 
I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.
-- Reuben Blades		 
More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul.
-- William Blake		 
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
-- William Blake		 
A truth that's told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent.
-- William Blake		 
Where there is money there is no art.
-- William Blake		 
I think the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is 16 tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition. The average high school child acquires a high school education, and this militates against Adam and Eve and all other myths of alleged history. When I was one of the editors of The Nation in the twenties, I wrote an editorial explaining that golf and intelligence were the two primary reasons that men did not attend church. Perhaps today I would say golf and a high school diploma.
-- Paul Blanchard		 
To be paranoid means to believe in delusions of danger and persecution. If the danger is real, and the evidence credible, then it cannot be delusional. To ignore the evidence, and hope that it CANNOT be true, is more an evidence of mental illness.
-- William Blase		 
Freedom of religion means the right of the individual to choose and to adhere to whichever religious beliefs he may prefer, to join with others in religious associations to express these beliefs, and to incur no civil disabilities because of his choice…
-- Joseph L. Blau		 
The vices of the rich and great are mistaken for error; and those of the poor and lowly, for crimes.
-- Lady Marguerite Blessington		 
Protectionism is a misnomer. The only people protected by tariffs, quotas and trade restrictions are those engaged in uneconomic and wasteful activity. Free trade is the only philosophy compatible with international peace and prosperity.
-- Dr. Walter Block		 
Protectionism is a misnomer. The only people protected by tariffs, quotas and trade restrictions are those engaged in uneconomic and wasteful activity. Free trade is the only philosophy compatible with international peace and prosperity.
-- Walter Block		 
Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities.
-- Alan Bloom		 
Q. What is meant by the term “constitution”?
A. A constitution embodies the fundamental principles of a government. Our constitution, adopted by the sovereign power, is amendable by that power only. To the constitution all laws, executive actions, and judicial decisions must conform, as it is the creator of the powers exercised by the departments of government.
Q. Why has our Constitution been classed as “rigid”?
A. The term “rigid” is used in opposition to “flexible” because the provisions are in a written document which cannot be legally changed with the same ease and in the same manner as ordinary laws. The British constitution, which is unwritten, can, on the other hand be changed overnight by an act of Parliament. ...
Q. Where, in the Constitution, is there mention of education?
A. There is none; education is a matter reserved for the States. ...
Q. Does the Constitution give us our rights and liberties?
A. No, it does not, it only guarantees them. The people had all their rights and liberties before they made the Constitution. The Constitution was formed, among other purposes, to make the people’s liberties secure -- secure not only as against foreign attack but against oppression by their own government. They set specific limits upon their national government and upon the States, and reserved to themselves all powers that they did not grant. The Ninth Amendment declares: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

-- Sol Bloom		 
Government should not tell you what to do unless there's a compelling public purpose.
-- Michael Bloomberg		 
A free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought.
-- Leon Blum		 
Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.
-- Léon Blum		 
What is so mind boggling is that all of this is being financed by the American people themselves through their own taxes. In other words, the American people are underwriting the destruction of their own freedom and way of life by lavishly financing through federal and state grants the very social scientists who are undermining our national sovereignty and preparing our children to become the dumbed-down vassals of the new world order.
-- Samuel L. Blumenfeld		 
When we think of the past, we forget the fools and remember the sage. We reverse the process for our own time.
-- George Boas		 
The real reason to abolish departments like Energy and Education is not to promote efficiency, nor even to save taxpayers’ money. It is that many agencies perform functions that are not Federal responsibility. The founders delegated to the Government only strictly defined authority in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution. Search the entire Constitution, and you will find no authorization for Congress to subsidize the arts, finance and regulate education or invest tax revenues in energy research.
-- David Boaz		 
Maybe that's because guns are sold at a profit, while schools are provided by the government.
-- David Boaz		 
American [public] schools are failing because they are organized according to a bureaucratic, monopolistic model; their organizing principle is basically the same as that of a socialist economy.
-- David Boaz		 
Power always corrupts, and the power of government to tell people how to live their lives or to transfer money from those who earn it to others is always a temptation to corruption. Taxes and regulations reduce people’s incentive to produce wealth, and government transfer programs reduce people’s incentive to work, to save, and to help family and friends in case of sickness, disability, or retirement. ...[I]t is nonetheless clear that government enterprises are less efficient, less innovative, and more wasteful than private firms.... [C]ompare what it’s like to call American Express versus the IRS to correct problems. Or compare a private apartment building with public housing.
-- David Boaz		 
The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That’s enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce’s office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services.
-- Alan Bock		 
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.\\ You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.\\ You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.\\ You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.\\ You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.\\ You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.\\ You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.\\ You cannot establish security on borrowed money.\\ You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.\\ You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
-- William Boetcker		 
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
-- Niels Bohr		 
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr		 
Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.
-- Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux		 
In the whole history of law and order, the biggest step was taken by primitive man when...the tribe sat in a circle and allowed only one man to speak at a time. An accused who is shouted down has no rights whatever.
-- Curtis Bok		 
It will be asked whether one would care to have one's young daughter read these books. I suppose that by the time she is old enough to wish to read them she will have learned the biologic facts of life and the words that go with them. There is something seriously wrong at home if those facts have not been met and faced and sorted by then; it is not children so much as parents that should receive our concern about this. I should prefer that my own three daughters meet the facts of life and the literature of the world in my library than behind a neighbor's barn, for I can face the adversary there directly. If the young ladies are appalled by what they read, they can close the book at the bottom of page one; if they read further, they will learn what is in the world and in its people, and no parents who have been discerning with their children need fear the outcome. Nor can they hold it back, for life is a series of little battles and minor issues, and the burden of choice is on us all, every day, young and old
-- Judge Curtis Bok		 
Some people are calling for the federal government to restrict the right to keep and bear arms of people who are on the federal government’s terrorism watch list. This is not only unconstitutional, but sets an extremely dangerous precedent for all our rights. If the federal government can take away someone else’s right to defend themselves simply because it has unilaterally decided to place them on a secret, wildly inaccurate list that’s virtually impossible to be removed from, eventually, some bureaucrat is going to find some way to put you on that list for another reason.
-- Michael Boldin		 
Whatever power you give politicians and bureaucrats to use against other people will eventually be used by future politicians and bureaucrats against you.
-- Michael Boldin		 
Not one cent should be raised unless it is in accord with the law.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes… Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
While I live I will never resort to irredeemable paper.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of people would die for Him.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
I want a situation without censorship, because I do not want to be responsible for whatever they may say.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte		 
I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.
-- Kit Bond		 
From the rostrum of the United Nations, we shall convince the colonial and semicolonial people to liberate themselves and to spread the Communist theory all over the world.
-- Soviet General Pantelei Bondarenko		 
The trouble with gold is that it turns its back on world improvers, empire builders and do-gooders.
-- Bill Bonner		 
The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn't have on things he doesn't need -- we're done for.
-- Bill Bonner		 
Whose service is perfect freedom.
-- Book of Common Prayer		 
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
-- Daniel Boorstin		 
Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful.
-- Neal Boortz		 
I can’t think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be.
-- Neal Boortz		 
You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'
-- Neal Boortz		 
Why is it when times get rough only the people have to look for ways to cut back?  Why is this always just absolutely impossible for government?
-- Neal Boortz		 
Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one.  Once again -- the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states.  Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches.  You won’t find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years.
-- Neal Boortz		 
THE most widespread form of child abuse in the United States is parents' sending children to the government to be educated.
-- Neal Boortz		 
How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?
-- Neal Boortz		 
This kind of rhetoric should be familiar to any who lived through the McCarthy era of the 1950s. It allows for no differences, not agreement to disagree, among adults or children.
-- David Booth		 
No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right.
-- William E. Borah		 
Who could impose such socialistic confiscatory rates?
-- William E. Borah		 
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
-- William E. Borah		 
Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen.
-- William E. Borah		 
Social Security is an unfunded pay-as-you-go system, fundamentally flawed and analogous in design to illegal pyramid schemes. Government accounting creates the illusion of a trust fund, but in fact, excess receipts are spent immediately. The government’s own actuaries predict the system will be bankrupt by 2030, but Social Security could face financial crisis as early as 2014. Moreover, Social Security’s relatively poor rate of return makes the program an increasingly worse investment for today’s young worker. ... The system design itself is fundamentally flawed and cannot be repaired. It must instead be replaced by one derived from free markets and operated by free citizenry making individual economic decisions in their own self-interest. ... Reform is long overdue. If we fail to act soon, our children will either inherit a bankrupt system or be forced to pay an impossibly high level of taxes. Only private pensions with individual property rights to accumulate fund balances can create a secure pension system. Chile, which privatized its system in 1981, provides evidence of such a system’s effectiveness.
-- Karl Borden		 
If a state militia guarantee rather than an individual right of citizens to keep and bear arms were the purpose of the second Amendment, it would have been totally unnecessary and irrelevant to include any guarantee of “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” since by its very nature a militia is necessarily an armed force and without arms it would be impossible to carry out its constitutional functions of suppressing insurrections and repelling invasions.
-- Bernard J. Bordonet		 
Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.
-- Dr. Jim Boren		 
Every bureaucrat has a constitutional right to fuzzify, profundify and drivelate. It's a part of our freedom of speech...If people can understand what is being said in Washington, they might want to take over their own government again.
-- Dr. Jim Boren		 
Public apathy is more powerful than public opinion. There's more of it.
-- Dr. Jim Boren		 
When in charge, ponder... When in trouble, delegate... When in doubt, mumble.
-- Dr. Jim Boren		 
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
-- Jorge Luis Borges		 
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges		 
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
-- Jorge Luis Borges		 
As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago.
-- Judge Robert Bork		 
The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings.
-- Judge Robert Bork		 
[A] society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.
-- Robert Bork		 
I don't think the Constitution is studied almost anywhere, including law schools. In law schools, what they study is what the court said about the Constitution. They study the opinions. They don't study the Constitution itself.
-- Robert Bork		 
Only the suppressed word is dangerous.
-- Ludwig Börne		 
A functioning police state needs no police.
-- William S. Borroughs		 
This country is not pro-American. It is United States property.
-- Juan Bosch		 
Who lies for you will lie against you.
-- Bosnian Proverb		 
[It is] a natural Right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the [English] Bill of rights, to keep arms for their own defense; and as Mr. Blackstone observes, it is to be made use of when the sanctions of Society and law are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.
-- Boston Evening Post		 
When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover that check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money.
-- Boston Federal Reserve Bank		 
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
-- James Boswell		 
Firearms, especially long guns, occupy a noble place in Canadian history since they are no doubt responsible for the exploitation of a vast and wild territory that had long remained untouched. From 1534 until 1979 (!), the importance of firearms remained uncontested. More than a simple tool of everyday life, they became truly a phenomenon of civilization. At all times and whoever he was, the Canadian was directly in contact with firearms, and he cannot be imagined otherwise. Even today, this symbol of liberty remains intimately related to wide, open spaces, and to a tolerant society. It is the distinctive mark of today's and yesterday's America. Here, in New France, let's repeat it, it is not only soldiers and nobles who have the possibility or privilege to bear arms. Century-old Canadian customs recognize equally to everybody the legal and moral right to acquire a firearm and to use it freely and noncoercively.
-- Russel Bouchard		 
Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.
-- Elias Boudinot		 
Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.
-- Kenneth Boulding		 
A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.
-- Kenneth Boulding		 
Ideas are to literature what light is to painting.
-- Paul Bourget		 
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society these irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.
-- Randolph Bourne		 
War is the health of the State.
-- Randolph Bourne		 
Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it! ... If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished -- in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad. The American Dream will then die -- on battlefields all over the world -- and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations.
-- George S. Boutwell		 
To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck.
-- James Bovard		 
Its contempt for citizens ... is so routine, and so unlimited, that the agency has become a kind of Frankenstein, running wild and terrorizing Americans at will. The IRS hypocritically requires mistake-free returns when its own books are in shambles. It demands exorbitant sums of money without regard to the accuracy of its claims. It doesn’t hesitate to use every possible maneuver to get what it wants, sometimes destroying businesses -- and lives -- in the process.
-- James Bovard		 
As we learned from the Clinton administration and much of the media, a machine gun in the hands of a federal agent is now a symbol of benevolence and concern for a child's well-being.
-- James Bovard		 
The people = government doctrine is equivalent to political infantilism -- an agreement to pretend that the citizen's wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him.
-- James Bovard		 
Subsidies entail politicians’ taking the citizen’s paycheck and then using it to buy his submission.
-- James Bovard		 
Assault weapons laws resemble hate speech laws. Hate speech laws usually begin by targeting a few words that almost no one approves. Once the system for controlling and punishing “hate speech” is put into place, there is little or nothing to stop it from expanding to punish more and more types of everyday speech. Similarly, once an assault weapons law is on the books, there is little to prevent politicians from vastly increasing the number of weapons banned under the law. The main effect of banning assault weapons is to give government an excuse to arrest and imprison millions of Americans while doing little or nothing to reduce crime. America has a limited number of police, and politicians must decide who the real public enemies are. If Mr. Clinton signs an assault weapons ban, it could signal the start of an attack on gun owners’ constitutional rights that could far surpass all previous gun bans.
-- James Bovard		 
The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur.
-- James Bovard		 
However accurate or inaccurate the agency’s numbers may be, tax law explicitly presumes that the IRS is always right -- and implicitly presumes that the taxpayer is always wrong -- in any dispute with the government. In many cases, the IRS introduces no evidence whatsoever of its charges; it merely asserts that a taxpayer had a certain amount of unreported income and therefore owes a proportionate amount in taxes, plus interest and penalties.
-- James Bovard		 
No-knock police raids destroy Americans’ right to privacy and safety. People’s lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants. ... Unfortunately, no-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justified nullifying the Fourth Amendment. ... No-knock raids in response to alleged narcotics violations presume that the government should have practically unlimited power to endanger some people’s lives in order to control what others ingest.
-- James Bovard		 
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
-- James Bovard		 
Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians.
-- Chester Bowles		 
The government expands at will, based on what might be charitably called flimsy constitutional reasoning and less charitably and more accurately called arrogant judicial tyranny. Government authority these days rarely comes from the Constitution as written but from the last carefully crafted misinterpretation of it. This is called legal precedent.
-- Linda Bowles		 
The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice.
-- Linda Bowles		 
The cause of freedom is the cause of God.
-- William Lisle Bowles		 
This [audit] was made extremely difficult because [IRS] existing Systems were not designed to provide reliable financial information... on their operations.
-- Charles A. Bowsher		 
Constitutional provisions for the security of person and property should be liberally construed. It is the duty of the courts to be watchful of constitutional rights against any stealthy encroachments thereon.
-- Boyd v. U.S.		 
If all were to share alike, and all were to do alike, then all were on an equality throughout, and one was as good as another; and so, if it did not actually abolish those very relations which God himself has set among men, it did at least greatly diminish the mutual respect that is so important should be preserved amongst them. Let none argue that this is due to human failing, rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself....
-- William Bradford		 
The experience that was had in ... the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth ... was found to breed much confusion and discontent; and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit.... For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service objected that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children, without any recompense.... The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men, who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger ones, thought it some indignity and disrespect to them.
-- William Bradford		 
Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful. Better a thousand fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people.
-- Charles Bradlaugh		 
If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of human kind.
-- Charles Bradlaugh		 
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
-- General Omar Bradley		 
In a small Swiss city sits an international organization so obscure and secretive....Control of the institution, the Bank for International Settlements, lies with some of the world's most powerful and least visible men: the heads of 32 central banks, officials able to shift billions of dollars and alter the course of economies at the stroke of a pen.
-- Keith Bradsher		 
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
-- Anne Bradstreet		 
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
-- Anne Bradstreet		 
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
-- Anne Bradstreet		 
Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us have been totally disarmed.
-- Sarah Brady (False)		 
I honestly believe that sound commercialism is the best test of true value in art. People work hard for their money and if they won’t part with it for your product the chances are that your product hasn’t sufficient value. An artist or writer hasn’t any monopoly .... If the public response to his artistry is lacking, he’d do well to spend more time analyzing what’s the matter with his work, and less time figuring what’s the matter with the public.
-- Berton Braley		 
Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Most of the things worth doing in the world have been declared impossible before they were done.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen... If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
'Stare decisis' is usually the wise policy.... [b]ut where correction through legislative action is practically impossible, this Court has often overruled its earlier decisions...
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
[The founding fathers] conferred, as against the Government, the right to be left alone -- the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
They: The makers of the Constitution: conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
In the frank expression of conflicting opinions lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system, that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
The most important political office is that of private citizen.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties... 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.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis		 
A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade... there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event.
-- Nathaniel Branden		 
The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism ...
-- Nathaniel Branden		 
Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological concept and an ethical-political one. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that a human being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately connected with the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept, individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights ...
-- Nathaniel Branden		 
Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism -- the belief that the individual exists to serve others -- is translated into political reality.
-- Nathaniel Branden		 
As teachers, we enter the minds of others; thus we live in eternity. We help others live better lives, thus teaching remains a mercy.
-- Dr. Paul F. Brandwein		 
Every child who believes in God is mentally ill.
-- Dr. Paul F. Brandwein (False)		 
Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.
-- Robert Brault		 
There is no wisdom without knowledge.
-- Tom Braun		 
If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom.
-- Tom Braun		 
Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk.
-- Bertolt Brecht		 
Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came? Why then, the war would come to you!
-- Bertolt Brecht		 
All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance – unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion, have the full protection of the guarantees [of the First Amendment].
-- Justice William J. Brennan		 
The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to “create” rights. Rather they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.
-- Justice William J. Brennan		 
The door of the Free Exercise Clause stands tightly closed against any government regulation of religious beliefs as such. Government may neither compel affirmation of a repugnant belief, nor penalize or discriminate against individuals or groups because they hold views abhorrent to the authorities.
-- Justice William J. Brennan		 
There is no such thing as a false idea.
-- Justice William J. Brennan		 
If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
-- Justice William J. Brennan		 
The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism.
-- Justice William J. Brennan		 
If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
-- Justice William J. Brennan		 
Historians and economists are very good at creating and perpetuating myths that justify increasing the power placed in the hands of government.
-- Reuven Brenner		 
Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure.
-- Kingman Brewster		 
And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens, [President Trump] could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control what people think. And that, that is our job.
-- Mika Brezinski		 
No man has ever been born a Negro hater, a Jew hater, or any other kind of hater. Nature refuses to be involved in such suicidal practices.
-- Harry Bridges		 
Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government.
-- Robert Briffault		 
Force is not a remedy.
-- John Bright		 
I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant		 
To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant		 
I waited and waited, and when no message came, I knew it must have been from you.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant		 
By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant		 
It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
-- David Brin		 
The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.
-- David Brinkley		 
Anybody that wants the Presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
-- David Broder		 
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.
-- Jacob Bronowski		 
But while capitalism may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism.
-- Yaron Brook		 
. . . for righteous monarchs, Justly to judge, with their own eyes should see; To rule o'er freemen, should themselves be free.
-- Henry Brooke		 
Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.
-- Bellamy Brooks		 
I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk.
-- Dr. Joyce Brothers		 
Free speech is about as good a cause as the world has ever known. But it…gets shoved aside in favor of things which at a given moment more vital…everybody favors free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground.
-- Heywood Broun		 
The censor believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all, it is life with which he quarrels.
-- Heywood Broun		 
The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice so pleasurable that I assume it must be evil.
-- Heywood Hale Broun		 
Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will turn vegetarian.
-- Heywood Hale Broun		 
The American communists worked energetically and tirelessly to lay the foundations for the United Nations which we were sure would come into existence. … It can be said, without exaggeration, that ever closer relations between our nation and the Soviet Union are an unconditional requirement for the United Nations as a world coalition. … The United Nations is the instrument for victory. Victory is required for the survival of our nation. The Soviet Union is an essential part of the United Nations. Mutual confidence between our country and the Soviet Union and joint work in the leadership of the United Nations are absolutely necessary.
-- Earl Browder		 
Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
-- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.		 
People take different roads seeking fulfillment & happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost.
-- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.		 
Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority.
-- James A. C. Brown		 
There exists a “fear of freedom” of selfhood, which makes people want to submerge themselves in the mass and confession is one of the obvious means by which they can do so, for thereby they lose those traits which cause them to feel separate.
-- James A. C. Brown		 
The quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy is understandable [...] There is only one problem with this approach. We are a court.
-- Justice Janice Brown		 
As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization [in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence.
-- Jerry Brown		 
Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense.
-- Norman O. Brown		 
[T]he best elements of the national and state bars are seriously and energetically working for practical reforms in legal procedure, in the manner of the selection of judges, and in the prevention of delays and against the miscarriage of justice, and this, too, by feasible and constitutional measures and by every constructive and really progressive method which can be devised; and that the fact that satisfactory remedies have not yet been attained, is not the fault of the bench or of the bar, whose leaders have for years been urging upon the people, through the legislatures, fully formulated and efficient remedial measures. The fault lies with the people themselves, whose direct representatives in the legislatures, national and state, refuse properly to consider and act upon proposed laws of authenticated and undeniable efficacy.
-- Rome G. Brown		 
The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.
-- Harry Browne		 
You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants.
-- Harry Browne		 
Being a politician means never having to say you're sorry. You don't have to say, 'I never should have voted to subsidize that ridiculous Enron project in India.' ... After all, they're greedy businessmen and you're a selfless public servant.
-- Harry Browne		 
For those looking for security, be forewarned that there's nothing more insecure than a political promise.
-- Harry Browne		 
The press is hostile to the idea of liberty.  Most people in the press are for big government.  Most people think that the solution to anything, whether it's health care problems, education, whatever it is -- it's got to be more government.
-- Harry Browne		 
The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances.
-- Harry Browne		 
We should never define libertarian positions in terms coined by liberals and conservatives, nor as some variant of their positions. We are not fiscally conservative and socially liberal. We are libertarians, who believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility on all issues at all times.
-- Harry Browne		 
If the Fed had a war on abortion like its war on poverty or war on drugs, within 5 years men would be having abortions!
-- Harry Browne		 
The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Compliance wastes billions of dollars. It penalizes savings and creates an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. It is incompatible with a free society, and we aren’t libertarians if we tolerate it.
-- Harry Browne		 
There are no violent gangs fighting over aspirin territories. There are no violent gangs fighting over whisky territories or computer territories or anything else that's legal. There are only criminal gangs fighting over territories covering drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other victimless crimes. Making a non-violent activity a crime creates a black market, which attracts criminals and gangs, which turns what was once a relatively harmless activity affecting a small group of people into a widespread epidemic of drug use and gang warfare.
-- Harry Browne		 
Government is a parasite—a cancer that by nature tries to spread deeper into society. Those who want to run others’ lives won’t give up and start minding their own business.
-- Harry Browne		 
Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats.
-- Harry Browne		 
The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, ‘See if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’
-- Harry Browne		 
A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot -- because the first leads inevitably to the second.
-- Harry Browne		 
Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all your money), and no right to compensation for the property that's been taken.
-- Harry Browne		 
I want a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution.
-- Harry Browne		 
A welfare state is frightened of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out.
-- Harry Browne		 
The elegance of honesty needs no adornment.
-- Merry Browne		 
The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority.
-- Sir Thomas Browne		 
Be assured that if this new provision [the 14th Amendment] be engrafted in the Constitution, it will, in time, change the entire structure and texture of our government, and sweep away all the guarantees of safety devised and provided by our patriotic Sires of the Revolution.
-- Orville Browning		 
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for?
-- Robert Browning		 
So free we seem, so fettered fast we are.
-- Robert Browning		 
[U]nderlying the gun control struggle is a fundamental division in our nation. The intensity of passion on this issue suggests to me that we are experiencing a sort of low grade war going on between two alternative views of what America is and ought to be. On the one side are those who take bourgeois Europe as a model of civilized society: a society just, equitable, and democratic; but well ordered, with the lines of responsibility and authority clearly drawn, and with decisions made rationally and correctly by intelligent men for the entire nation. To such people, hunting is atavistic, personal violence is shameful, and uncontrolled gun ownership is a blot on civilization. On the other side is a group of people who do not tend to be especially articulate or literate, and whose world view is rarely expressed in print. .... They ask, because they do not understand the other side, “Why do these people want to disarm us?” They consider themselves no threat to anyone; they are not criminals, not revolutionaries. But slowly, as they become politicized, they find an analysis that fits the phenomenon they experience: Someone fears their having guns, someone is afraid of their defending their families, property, and liberty. Nasty things may begin to happen if these people begin to feel that they are cornered.
-- B. Bruce-Briggs		 
In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.
-- Lenny Bruce		 
They call it the Halls of Justice because the only place you get justice is in the halls.
-- Lenny Bruce		 
Anyone who does anything for pleasure to indulge his selfish soul will surely burn in Hell.
-- Lenny Bruce		 
As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought.
-- Tammy Bruce		 
No matter how noble the original intentions, the seductions of power can turn any movement from one seeking equal rights to one that would deny them to others.
-- Tammy Bruce		 
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
-- Giordano Bruno		 
Every time we establish a new crime, we’re creating a new mechanism for the government to check up on you.
-- James A. Bruton, III		 
I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befall this country, than be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge. If this be a just remark, it is unwise and improvident to vest in the general government a power to borrow at discretion, without any limitation or restriction.
-- Brutus		 
Money power denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.
-- William Jennings Bryan		 
You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
-- William Jennings Bryan		 
If you are afraid to speak against tyranny, then you are already a slave.
-- John "Birdman" Bryant		 
Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again.
-- William Cullen Bryant		 
The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the pen, by the press, all political questions, and to examine the animadvert upon all political institutions is a right so clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact, to their existence, that without it we must fall into despotism and anarchy.
-- William Cullen Bryant		 
Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions.
-- James Bryce		 
I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found them able to indicate a single point in which the individual is worse off in England as regards his private civil rights or his general liberty of doing and thinking as he pleases. They generally turn the discussion to social equality, the existence of a monarchy and hereditary titles and so forth – matters which are, of course, quite different from freedom in its proper sense.
-- James Bryce		 
Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen...
-- Zbigniew Brzezinski		 
If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.
-- James Buchanan		 
I like the noise of democracy.
-- James Buchanan		 
What is right and what is practicable are two different things.
-- James Buchanan		 
We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy. We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called 'isolationism.'
-- Patrick J. Buchanan		 
The village atheist has the right to be heard; he has no right to be heeded. While he has a right not to have his own children indoctrinated in what he believes are false and foolish teachings, he has no right to dictate what other children may be taught.
-- Patrick J. Buchanan		 
Tax reform is taking the taxes off things that have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven't been taxed before.
-- Art Buchwald		 
If the sincere and thoughtful Mason would “take notice” of the symbolism and the use made everywhere in the Lodge of the word “Light,” and remember that the real Initiates are called also “the Illuminati.”
-- J.D. Buck		 
None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
-- Pearl S. Buck		 
Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it.
-- Pearl S. Buck		 
We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.		 
All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.		 
Now it is one thing to say (I say it) that people shouldn’t consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely something else to condone marijuana laws, the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to inform ourselves on the question?
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.		 
Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.		 
Marijuana is not much more difficult to obtain than beer. The reason for this is that a liquor store selling beer to a minor stands to lose its liquor license. Marijuana salesmen don't have expensive overheads, and so are not easily punished.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.		 
As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts.
-- Buddha		 


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