Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
We do not need more intellectual power, we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge, we need more character. We do not need more government, we need more culture. We do not need more law, we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.... If the foundation is firm, the superstructure will stand.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts.... Self-government means self-reliance.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
Nature is inexorable. If men do not follow the truth they cannot live.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
As I went about with my father, when he collected taxes, I knew that when taxes were laid someone had to work hard to earn the money to pay them.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
Government price-fixing once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
A wholesome regard for the memory of the great men of long ago is the best assurance to a people of a continuation of great men to come, who shall be able to instruct, to lead, and to inspire. A people who worship at the shrine of true greatness will themselves be truly great.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
Unless the people, through unified action, arise and take charge of their government, they will find that their government has taken charge of them. Independence and liberty will be gone, and the general public will find itself in a condition of servitude to an aggregation of organized and selfish interest.
-- Calvin Coolidge		 
Reason and virtue alone can bestow liberty.
-- Anthony Ashley Cooper		 
Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a free man. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.
-- James Fenimore Cooper		 
The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority. Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals.
-- James Fenimore Cooper		 
Liberty is not a matter of words, but a positive and important condition of society. Its greatest safeguard after placing its foundations in a popular base, is in the checks and balances imposed on the public servants.
-- James Fenimore Cooper		 
It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly-prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong.
-- James Fenimore Cooper		 
Commerce is entitled to a complete and efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes to control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high principles of natural justice that ought to lie at the root of every political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked.
-- James Fenimore Cooper		 
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
-- James Fenimore Cooper		 
Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals.
-- James Fenimore Cooper		 
An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.
-- Col. Jeff Cooper		 
An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.
-- Jeff Cooper		 
The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power.
-- Thomas Cooper		 
Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.
-- Thomas Cooper		 
When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback.
-- Bill Copeland		 
Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the Universe. All this is suggested by the systematic procession of events and the harmony of the whole Universe, if only we face the facts, as they say, `with both eyes open'.
-- Copernicus		 
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.
-- Alan Corenk		 
Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
-- II Corinthians		 
Censorship is contagious, and experience with this culture of regulation teaches us that regulatory enthusiasts herald each new medium of communications as another opportunity to spread the disease.
-- Robert Corn-Revere		 
Do your duty, and leave the rest to heaven.
-- Pierre Corneille		 
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
-- Bill Cosby		 
He [a U.S. Senator] knows he's got to buy time on my radio station, so he's going to lend me an ear. We're keeping them alive back home and that's why the newspaper and radio and TV people are more effective lobbyists.
-- Joseph Costello		 
If you pinch the sea of its liberty, though it be walls of stone or brass, it will beat them down.
-- John Cotton		 
In the Jim Crow South, for example, government failed and indeed refused to protect blacks from extra-legal violence. Given our history, it's stunning we fail to question those who would force upon us a total reliance on the state for defense.
-- Robert J. Cottrol		 
In education markets, like the Asian tutoring industry, top teachers are superstars who get to design curricula for thousands or even millions of students and train scores or hundreds of other teachers to use their effective methods. Quality providers expand and are emulated by competitors, and there is a powerful incentive for meaningful innovation. ... One teacher in Korea’s private tutoring sector made $2 million last year because his web-based employer has profit sharing and he’s brilliant at what he does, so he gets tons of students. That’s what should have happened to [Jaime] Escalante. That’s the sort of success that should greet excellence in education at all levels. It doesn’t because we don’t have a market.
-- Andrew J. Coulson		 
[A] possible further difficulty is cited, namely, that arising from the Constitutional provision that only Congress may declare war. This argument is countered with the contention that a treaty will override this barrier, let alone the fact that our participation in such police action as might be recommended by the international security organization need not necessarily be construed as war.
-- Council on Foreign Relations		 
The sovereignty fetish is still so strong in the public mind, that there would appear to be little chance of winning popular assent to American membership in anything approaching a super-state organization. Much will depend on the kind of approach which is used in further popular education.
-- Council on Foreign Relations		 
Some suggested over the weekend that it's wrong to expect Elian Gonzalez to live in a place that tolerates no dissent or freedom of political expression. They were talking about Miami.
-- Katie Couric		 
We consistently have adhered to the principle that the will of the people is the paramount consideration. Our goal today…[is] to reach the result that reflects the will of the voters…. The laws are intended to facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her will in the context of our representative democracy. Technical statutory requirements must not be exalted over the substance of this right.
-- Florida Supreme Court		 
The nearer the power to enact laws and control public servants lies with the great body of the people, the more nearly does a government take unto itself the form of a republic -- not in name alone, but in fact.
-- Oregon Supreme Court		 
If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable.
-- Georges Courteline		 
History is a vast early warning system.
-- Norman Cousins		 
A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas – a place where history comes to life.
-- Norman Cousins		 
I cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both. Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth.
-- Norman Cousins		 
Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside of ourselves will affect us.
-- Steven R. Covey		 
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
-- Steven R. Covey		 
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. 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.
-- Richard Cowan		 
It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
-- Noël Coward		 
It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
-- Noel Coward		 
I've over-educated myself in all the things I shouldn't have known.
-- Noel Coward		 
The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves, under whatsoever form it be of government; the liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country.
-- Abraham Cowley		 
Life is an incurable disease.
-- Abraham Cowley		 
Then liberty, like day,\\ Breaks on the soul,\\ and by a flash from Heaven\\ Fires all the faculties with glorious joy.
-- William Cowper		 
But slaves that once conceive the glowing thought\\ Of freedom, in that hope itself possess\\ All that the contest calls for; spirit, strength,\\ The scorn of danger, and united hearts,\\ The surest presage of the good they seek.
-- William Cowper		 
Absence of occupation is not rest,\\A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd.
-- William Cowper		 
'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower\\ Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;\\ And we are weeds without it.
-- William Cowper		 
No, Freedom has a thousand charms to show\\ That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.
-- William Cowper		 
He is the freeman whom the truth makes free.
-- William Cowper		 
He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, And all are slaves besides.
-- William Cowper		 
To follow foolish precedents, and wink\\ With both our eyes, is easier than to think.
-- William Cowper		 
Freedom has a thousand charms to show,\\ That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.
-- William Cowper		 
It is always the task of the intellectual to “think otherwise.” This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.
-- Harvey Cox		 
The holier-than-thou activists who blame the population for not spending more money on their personal crusades are worse than aggravating. They encourage the repudiation of personal responsibility by spreading the lie that support of a government program fulfills individual moral duty.
-- Patrick Cox		 
The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'.
-- Stephen Cox		 
The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army,  must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
-- Tench Coxe		 
The militia, who are in fact the effective part of the people at large, will render many troops quite unnecessary. They will form a powerful check upon the regular troops, and will generally be sufficient to over-awe them
-- Tench Coxe		 
As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them.
-- Tench Coxe		 
Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
-- Tench Coxe		 
Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.
-- Tench Coxe		 
Democracy needs more free speech for even the speech of foolish people is valuable if it serves to guarantee the right of the wise to talk.
-- David Cushman Coyle		 
[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state -- what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations -- what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force.
-- Edward H. Crane		 
The Great Depression was not caused by laissez faire but by the actions of well-intended politicians and bureaucrats. The Federal Reserve System, after all, was not created in response to the Great Depression, but in 1913. Soon thereafter it began experimenting with its awesome powers, expanding the money supply during the roaring ‘20s, propping up the pound sterling in London, extending credit so Europeans could buy American agricultural products. All the while, Congress was becoming more and more protectionist. When the Fed reversed policies in 1929 and actually shrunk the money supply by a third over the next three years and Congress culminated its protectionist tendencies with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the collapse was underway. The fact that Hoover then raised taxes and Roosevelt kept wages artificially high guaranteed the massive unemployment that marked the 1930s. Government caused and exacerbated the Great Depression.
-- Edward H. Crane		 
Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, of course, lays out the delegated, enumerated, and therefore limited powers of Congress. Only through a deliberate misreading of the general welfare and commerce clauses of the Constitution has the federal government been allowed to overreach its authority and extend its tendrils into every corner of civil society.
-- Edward H. Crane		 
In the United States there is no phenomenon more threatening to popular government than the unwillingness of newspapers to give the facts to their readers.
-- Nelson Antrim Crawford		 
The impact of Zenger [the trial of John Zenger] on the American colonies was dramatic. Every jurisdiction which confronted the issue of the jury’s right to decide the law as well as the facts reached the same conclusion: American juries had the right to decide the law.
-- M. Kristine Creagan		 
Jury nullification is a doctrine based on the concept that “jurors have the inherent right to set aside the instructions of the judge and to reach a verdict of acquittal based upon their own consciences, and the defendant has the right to be so instructed.” Though jury nullification may seem like a shocking proposal today, it is by no means a new idea. In fact, jury nullification was first espoused nearly three and one half centuries ago.
-- M. Kristine Creagan		 
Things in law tend to be black and white. But we all know that some people are a little bit guilty, while other people are guilty as hell.
-- Donald R. Cressey		 
I operate under the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. ... It operates with the objective to simplify and exaggerate, which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists.
-- Dr. Michael Crichton		 
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
-- Michael Crichton		 
What censorship accomplishes, creating an unreal and hypocritical mythology, fomenting an attraction for forbidden fruit, inhibiting the creative minds among us and fostering an illicit trade. Above all, it curtails the right of the individual, be he creator or consumer, to satisfy his intellect and his interest without harm. In our law-rooted society, we are not the keeper of our brother’s morals – only of his rights.
-- Judith Crist		 
Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human... No people will be truly free till all are free.
-- Benedetto Croce		 
I leave this rule for others when I'm dead, Be always sure you're right -- then go ahead.
-- Davy Crockett		 
We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not attempt to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.
-- Davy Crockett		 
We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money.
-- Davy Crockett		 
There ain't no ticks like poly-ticks. Bloodsuckers all.
-- Davy Crockett		 
I want people to be able to get what they need to live: enough food, a place to live, and an education for their children. Government does not provide these as well as private charities and businesses.
-- Davy Crockett		 
The First Amendment was never intended to insulate our public institutions from any mention of God, the Bible or religion. When such insulation occurs, another religion, such as secular humanism, is effectively established.
-- Crockett v. Sorenson		 
It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it.
-- Oliver Cromwell		 
News reporters are certainly liberal and left of center.
-- Walter Cronkite		 
It is a seldom proffered argument as to the advantages of a free press that it has a major function in keeping the government itself informed as to what the government is doing.
-- Walter Cronkite		 
When law enforcers are shown to have such unswerving integrity, only the most churlish among us would question the methods they use to “get their man.” Constitutional guarantees are regarded as bothersome “technicalities” that impede honest law enforcers in the performance of their duties.
-- Donna Woolfolk Cross		 
It's important to understand that the idea of political correctness, from its inception, was designed as a political weapon to silence voices of dissent ... today’s social media outrage can be tomorrow’s laws.
-- Steven Crowder		 
This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you... Hate speech is inextricably tied to political correctness, or Cultural Marxism, and that creates intellectual conformity -- or intellectual authoritarianism. And that’s where you start to see things like “safe spaces” or “trigger warnings” or speakers banned from campus, or people with unpopular opinions banned from social media.
-- Steven Crowder		 
This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you...
-- Steven Crowder		 
Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.
-- Ellwood P. Cubberley		 
There is a de facto “secret government” operating nationally and internationally and involved in the highest circles of the U.S. government, exercising an impact over domestic policies and economics ranging between extreme influence to, at times, outright control. This extreme influence to outright control naturally includes the Presidency. The de facto “secret government,” much of whose intellectual—and financial—muscle are to be found in the New York office of the CFR, the great tax-free foundations, and certain international firms and corporations.
-- Mike Culbert		 
We don't know who discovered water, but we are certain it wasn't a fish.
-- John Culkin		 
To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
-- e. e. cummings		 
Only the rare taxpayer would be likely to know that he could refuse to produce his records to IRS agents... Who would believe the ironic truth that the cooperative taxpayer fares much worse than the individual who relies upon his constitutional rights.
-- Judge Walter Joseph Cummings Jr.		 
It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.
-- John Philpot Curran		 
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
-- John Philpot Curran		 
A person's right to a job is as specious as his boss' right to success in business. There is no right to a minimum wage, just as there is no right to success in self-employment.
-- Rex Curry		 
There can be no crime, there can be no misdemeanor without a law written or unwritten, express or implied.
-- Benjamin Curtis		 
A greater principle is at stake than the fate of any particular president
-- Benjamin Curtis		 
Treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors are high crimes, other high crimes and misdemeanors must be akin to treason and bribery.
-- Benjamin Curtis		 
My first position is that when Congress speaks of treason, bribery, and other crimes and misdemeanors, it refers to and includes only high criminal offenses against the United States made so by some law of the United States existing when the acts complained of were done. And I say that this is plainly to be inferred from each and every one of the provisions of the constitution on the subject of impeachment.
-- Benjamin Curtis		 
The big thieves hang the little ones.
-- Czech Proverb		 
Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant. The further society "progresses," the grander the scale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries.
-- M. Robin D'Antan		 
Collectivist ethical principle: man is not an end to himself, but is only a tool to serve the ends of others. Whether those 'others' are a dictator's gang, the nation, society, the race, (the) god(s), the majority, the community, the tribe, etc., is irrelevant -- the point is that man in principle must be sacrificed to others.
-- Mark Da Cunha		 
In principle, there are only two fundamental political viewpoints. That is, two contradictory ends of the 'political spectrum.' Those two principles are freedom and slavery.
-- Mark Da Cunha		 
Collectivism, unlike individualism, holds the group as the primary, and the standard of moral value.
-- Mark Da Cunha		 
Positive laws are tyrannical. One's individual rights -- whether they be life, liberty, or property -- must be sacrificed by the state in order to fulfill the positive rights of another. For example, if housing is considered a "right," then the state will have to confiscate wealth (property) from those who have provided shelter for themselves in order to house those who have not. ... True justice is realized when our lives, and property are secure, and we are free to express our thoughts without fear of retribution. Just laws are negative in nature; they exist to thwart the violation of our natural rights. Government ought to be the collective organization -- that is, the extension -- of the individual's right of self-defense, and its purpose to protect our lives, liberties, and property.
-- Mark Da Vee		 
The desire to know is natural to good men.
-- Leonardo da Vinci		 
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
-- Leonardo da Vinci		 
It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
-- Leonardo Da Vinci		 
Anyone who argues by referring to authority is not using his mind but rather his memory.
-- Leonardo da Vinci		 
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
-- Leonardo Da Vinci		 
I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: "Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?
-- Leonardo da Vinci		 
It takes a long time to understand nothing.
-- Edward Dahlberg		 
Today, The Daily Telegraph starts its 'A Free Country' campaign. Week by week, and in major individual investigations, we shall examine how freedom is being taken away, whether by Westminster or Whitehall or Brussels or any other authority. We shall try to annoy the control freaks, whether they are Right, Left or Centre, and we shall welcome allies for freedom from all quarters. The Conservative leadership contestants hardly breathe a word about freedom. The Labour Government's Queen's Speech is a shopping list of attacks on our liberties. There's plenty to do. Libertad o muerte!
-- Daily Telegraph		 
If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.
-- Dalai Lama		 
The police are not here to create disorder. The police are here to preserve disorder.
-- Mayor Richard Daley		 
...it was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World-Money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York Market.
-- Curtis Dall		 
...Most of his thoughts, his political 'ammunition,'...were carefully manufactured for him in advance by the CFR-One World Money group. Brilliantly... he exploded that prepared 'ammunition' in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people--and thus paid off and retained his internationalist political support.
-- Curtis Dall		 
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. 
-- Theodore Dalrymple		 
There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.
-- William Damon		 
Our experience has shown us that in the excitement of great popular elections, deciding the policy of the country, and its vast patronage, frauds will be committed, if a chance is given for them. If these frauds are allowed, the result is not only that the popular will may be defeated, and the result falsified, but that the worst side will prevail. The side which has the greater number of dishonest men will poll the most votes. The war cry, "Vote early and vote often!" and the familiar problem, "how to cast the greatest number of votes with the smallest number of voters", indicate the direction in which the dangers lie.
-- Richard Henry Dana, Jr.		 
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
-- Frank Dane		 
I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. ... I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. ... We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected.
-- John C. Danforth		 
It is up to you to decide whether or not you’re ready to be free, really free. This pertains to your relationship as well as your activities in the world. You are limitless, if you choose that! Your freedom comes from letting go. Freedom means empowerment to be, do, go, feel, whatever your heart tells you. Only you have kept yourself from having this freedom out of some misunderstanding of what your responsibilities really are. Your responsibilities are to your Self. Serve that truly, fully, and you serve All.
-- Alma Daniel		 
Every private citizen has a public responsibility.
-- Myra Janco Daniels		 
He who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning.
-- Danish Proverb		 
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
-- Dante		 
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. From him who will not give her all, she will have nothing. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private school . . . At the next session you may ban books and newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
There is no such thing as justice -- in or out of court.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.
-- Clarence S. Darrow		 
To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.
-- Charles Darwin		 
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
-- Charles Darwin		 
The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.
-- Charles Darwin		 
The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal.
-- Charles Darwin		 
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
-- Charles Darwin		 
Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic -- why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students.
-- Steve Dasbach		 
If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.
-- Ram Dass		 
When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.
-- James Dale Davidson		 
The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless.
-- James Dale Davidson		 
So low and hopeless are the finances of the United States, that, the year before last Congress was obliged to borrow money even, to pay the interest of the principal which we had borrowed before. This wretched resource of turning interest into principal, is the most humiliating and disgraceful measure that a nation could take, and approximates with rapidity to absolute ruin: Yet it is the inevitable and certain consequence of such a system as the existing Confederation.
-- William Richardson Davie		 
The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence; as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority.
-- Justice David Davis		 
The Republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it ... This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.
-- Elmer Davis		 
This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle – among others – that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error; that in the competition of the marketplace of ideas, the sounder ideas will in the long run win out.
-- Elmer Davis		 
The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it.
-- Elmer Davis		 
Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.
-- Jefferson Davis		 
It is ironic that our government, which has been relentlessly critical of the messages that popular culture imparts to our youth, would seek to silence an artist who uses the medium of hip hop to preach a message of self respect and self reliance to young women and girls.
-- Lisa E. Davis		 
Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.
-- Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis		 
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
-- Richard Dawkins		 
You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal.
-- John De Armond		 
There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
-- Honoré de Balzac		 
Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.
-- Honore de Balzac		 
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
-- Honore de Balzac		 
I claim for the nation an education that depends only on the State, because children of the State must be raised by members of the State.
-- Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais		 
It is the part of wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket.
-- Miguel de Cervantes		 
Society is composed of two great classes - those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
-- Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort		 
The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of pleasures.
-- Luc de Clapiers		 
Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license,” and they will define freedom out of existence.
-- Voltairine de Cleyre		 
The revolution is ... the blow dealt ... against the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty.
-- Voltairine de Cleyre		 
...So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
-- Voltairine de Cleyre		 
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
-- Charles de Gaulle		 
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.
-- Charles De Gaulle		 
I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
-- Charles De Gaulle		 
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
-- Charles de Gaulle		 
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
-- Remy De Gourmont		 
Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free.
-- Remy de Gourmont		 
A large number of people, certainly the majority of the political looter class, think the best way to deal with the rapidly deepening economic crisis is via 'stimulus packages' with money plucked off the magic money tree... which is to say, by trying to re-inflate the credit bubble that actually caused the crisis. This is a bit like treating alcoholics by urging them to buy more whiskey.
-- Perry de Havilland		 
I have often lamented that with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the forces of liberalism did not spend nearly enough time ruthlessly driving intellectual stakes through the hearts of all those who supported the 'Evil Empire' or preached appeasement or claimed that the Soviet system was 'just another way of living' rather than a mass murderous tyranny.
-- Perry de Havilland		 
The Radical Centre seem to have the same obsession with control that the fascists and communists had, but unlike them, it is control for control's sake rather than in the service of some clear ideology ... They do not seek the triumph of Volk or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they just seek to replace all social interactions with politically mediated interactions. They seek to regulate everything via a total state that ... just wants a world in which nothing whatsoever is private, everything is political. Their symbol is not the Hammer and Sickle or the Swastika, it is the CCTV camera.
-- Perry de Havilland		 
... the smaller the domain where choices among alternatives are made collectively, the smaller will be the probability that any individual's preference gets overruled.
-- Anthony de Jasay		 
People who live in states have as a rule never experienced the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical possibility of moving from the one to the other ... On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses about the relative merits of state and state of nature? ... My contention here is that preferences for political arrangements of society are to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that political institutions are either addictive like some drugs, or allergy-inducing like some others, or both, for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others.
-- Anthony de Jasay		 
Self-imposed limits on sovereign power can disarm mistrust, but provide no guarantee of liberty and property beyond those afforded by the balance between state and private force.
-- Anthony de Jasay		 
In the process of helping some (perhaps most) people to more utility and justice, the state imposes on civil society a system of interdictions and commands.
-- Anthony de Jasay		 
Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure.
-- Anthony de Jasay		 
People who live in states have as a rule never experienced the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical possibility of moving from the one to the other ... On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses about the relative merits of state and state of nature? ... My contention here is that preferences for political arrangements of society are to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that political institutions are either addictive like some drugs, or allergy-inducing like some others, or both, for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others.
-- Anthony de Jasay		 
Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel		 
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel		 
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel		 
The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel		 
It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.
-- Estienne de la Boétie		 
However, there is satisfaction in examining what they get out of all this torment, what advantage they derive from all the trouble of their wretched existence. Actually the people never blame the tyrant for the evils they suffer, but they do place responsibility on those who influence him; peoples, nations, all compete with one another, even the peasants, even the tillers of the soil, in mentioning the names of the favorites, in analyzing their vices, and heaping upon them a thousand insults, a thousand obscenities, a thousand maledictions. All their prayers, all their vows are directed against these persons; they hold them accountable for all their misfortunes, their pestilences, their famines; and if at times they show them outward respect, at those very moments they are fuming in their hearts and hold them in greater horror than wild beasts. This is the glory and honor heaped upon influential favorites for their services by people who, if they could tear apart their living bodies, would still clamor for more, only half satiated by the agony they might behold. For even when the favorites are dead those who live after are never too lazy to blacken the names of these people-eaters with the ink of a thousand pens, tear their reputations into bits in a thousand books, and drag, so to speak, their bones past posterity, forever punishing them after their death for their wicked lives.
-- Estienne de la Boétie		 
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.
-- Étienne de la Boétie		 
A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob; an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen.
-- Jean de la Bruyere		 
A wise man neither suffers himself to be governed, nor attempts to govern others.
-- Jean de la Bruyere		 
O liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name! [Fr., O liberte! que de crimes on commet dans ton nom!]
-- Madame Jeanne Marie Phlipon de La Platiere Roland		 
Everyone complains of his memory, none of his judgment.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld		 
Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld		 
We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld		 
Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld		 
Love of justice in the generality of men is only the fear of suffering from injustice.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld		 
Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld		 
Nothing is given so profusely as advice.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld		 
Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld		 
A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld		 
Republicanism and ignorance are in bitter antagonism.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine		 
Void of freedom, what would virtue be?
-- Alphonse de Lamartine		 
At twenty every one is republican.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine		 
There is in human affairs one order which is best. That order is not always the one which exists; but it is the order which should exist for the greatest good of humanity. God knows, it and will it: man's duty it is to discover and establish it.
-- Emile Louis Victor de Laveleye		 
No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies.
-- Salvador de Madariaga		 
He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power.
-- Salvador De Madariaga		 
He is free who knows how to keep in his own hand the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power.
-- Salvador de Madariaga		 
Every nation gets the government it deserves.
-- Joseph de Maistre		 
To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.
-- Michel De Montaigne		 
It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration -- nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.
-- Michel De Montaigne		 
A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.
-- Michel de Montaigne		 
I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can.
-- Michel de Montaigne		 
Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other.
-- Michel de Montaigne		 
Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another's net.
-- Michel De Montaigne		 
I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.
-- Michel de Montaigne		 
A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom.
-- Michel De Montaigne		 
If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
-- Michel De Montaigne		 
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
-- Michel de Montaigne		 
I quote others only the better to express myself.
-- Michel De Montaigne		 
There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thought under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
-- Michel de Montaigne		 
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
-- Michel de Montaigne		 
If falsehood like truth had only one face, we would be in better shape. For we would take as certain the opposite of what the liar said. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.
-- Michel de Montaigne		 
Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
-- Michel De Montaigne		 
I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so.
-- Michel De Montaigne		 
He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying.
-- Michel de Montaigne		 
It is unreasonable ... to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life.
-- Charles de Montesquieu		 
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
-- Charles de Montesquieu		 
Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty. [Fr., Les republiques finissent par le luxe; les monarchies, par la pauvrete.]
-- Charles de Montesquieu		 
In the state of nature...all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.
-- Charles de Montesquieu		 
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
-- Charles de Montesquieu		 
Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.
-- Charles de Montesquieu		 
Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits.
-- Louis Charles Alfred de Musset		 
The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.
-- Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre		 
The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance.
-- Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre		 
The evil of democracy is not the triumph of quantity, but the triumph of bad quality.
-- Guido De Ruggiero		 
I know of but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
-- Antoine De Saint-Exupery		 
People haven't time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry		 
True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.
-- Antoine De Saint-Exupery		 
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
-- Charles-Louis De Secondat		 
But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.
-- Charles-Louis de Secondat		 
Useless laws weaken necessary laws.
-- Charles-Louis de Secondat		 
In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.
-- Charles-Louis de Secondat		 
What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.
-- Charles-Louis de Secondat		 
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
-- Charles-Louis De Secondat		 
We ought to be very cautious in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty, and may be the origin of a number of petty acts of tyranny if the legislator be not on his guard; for as such an accusation does not bear directly on the overt acts of a citizen, but refers to the idea we entertain of his character.
-- Charles-Louis De Secondat		 
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
-- Charles-Louis de Secondat		 
Moral indignation is in most cases 2% moral, 48% indignation and 50% envy.
-- Vittorio de Sica		 
It is within the police power of the state to prohibit public use of fighting words that create a danger of breach of the peace, but simply to prohibit public use of fighting words is too broad. Those words may sometimes be used in situations where there is no danger.
-- Ithiel De Sola Pool		 
It [government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
Where are we then? The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a taste for law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
Quand donc je refuse d'obéir à une loi injuste, je ne dénie point à la majorité le droit de commander; j'en appelle seulement de la souveraineté du peuple à la souveraineté du genre humain. Il y a des gens qui n'ont pas craint de dire qu'un peuple, dans les objets qui n'intéressaient que lui-même, ne pouvait sortir entièrement des limites de la justice et de la raison, et qu'ainsi on ne devait pas craindre de donner tout pouvoir à la majorité qui le représente. Mais c'est là un langage d'esclave.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so, and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
When, after having examined in detail the organization of the Supreme Court, one comes to consider in sum the prerogatives that have been given it, one discovers without difficulty that a more immense judicial power has never been constituted in any people.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
[Tyrannical] power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
In towns it is impossible to prevent men from assembling, getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves. Towns are like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members. In them the people wield immense influence over their magistrates and often carry their desires into execution without intermediaries.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
... liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
By the side of these religious men I discern others whose looks are turned to the earth more than to Heaven; they are the partisans of liberty, not only as the source of the noblest virtues, but more especially as the root of all solid advantages; and they sincerely desire to extend its sway, and to impart its blessings to mankind. It is natural that they should hasten to invoke the assistance of religion, for they must know that liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith; but they have seen religion in the ranks of their adversaries, and they inquire no further; some of them attack it openly, and the remainder are afraid to defend it.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
In order to enjoy the inestimable benefits that the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils it creates…
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
America is great because America is good. If America ever ceases to be good it will cease to be great.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville (False)		 
They certainly are not great writers, but they speak their country's language and they make themselves heard.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations...In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
If it be admitted that a man, possessing absolute power, may misuse that power by wronging his adversaries, why should a majority not be liable to the same reproach? Men are not apt to change their character by agglomeration; nor does their patience in the presence of obstacles increase with the consciousness of their strength. And for these reasons I can never willingly invest any number of my fellow creatures with that unlimited authority which I should refuse to any one of them.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
[T]he main evil of the present democratic institutions of the united states does not raise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny.
-- Alexis De Tocqueville		 
[Some people] have a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government amongst a people in which the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and I think that, if such a government were once established amongst such a people, it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them of several of the highest qualities of humanity. Despotism, therefore, appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic times.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
The electors see their representative not only as a legislator for the state but also as the natural protector of local interests in the legislature; indeed, they almost seem to think that he has a power of attorney to represent each constituent, and they trust him to be as eager in their private interests as in those of the country.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
There is hardly a congressman prepared to go home until he has at least one speech printed and sent to his constituents, and he won't let anybody interrupt his harangue until he has made all his useful suggestions about the 24 states of the Union, and especially the district he represents.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
The man who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
...above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare them for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood...
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. ... I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors, her ample rivers, and it was not there. I sought for it in the fertile fields, and boundless prairies, and it was not there. I sought it in her rich mines, and vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville (Questionable)		 
The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville		 
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.
-- Miguel de Unamuno		 
This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornotherapy, pollution, poisoning and proliferation of crimes of all types.
-- Judge Braswell Dean		 
The media I've had a lot to do with is lazy. We fed them and they ate it every day.
-- Michael Deaver		 
Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things a different way.
-- Edward Debono		 
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.
-- Eugene Debs		 
Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
-- Eugene Debs		 
If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas.
-- Graceanne A. Decandido		 
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.— Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world...
-- Declaration of Independence		 
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, ... That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.
-- Declaration of Independence		 
But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
-- Declaration of Independence		 
I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.
-- Daniel Defoe		 
Some of the same people who laugh at gypsy fortune tellers take economists seriously.
-- William DeFoe		 
Diplomats are only useful in fair weather. As soon as it rains, they drown in every drop.
-- Charles DeGaulle		 
Honest labor bears a lovely face.
-- Thomas Dekker		 
We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. ... The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.
-- Dr. Jose Delgado		 
Those with power are frequently least aware of -- or least willing to acknowledge -- its existence [and] those with less power are often most aware of its existence.
-- Lisa Delpit		 
The sentiment that modern day ordinary Canadians do not need firearms for protection is pleasant but unrealistic. To discourage responsible deserving Canadians from possessing firearms for lawful self-defence and other legitimate purposes is to risk sacrificing them at the altar of political correctness.
-- Don Demetrick		 
The best wrestler is not he who has learned thoroughly all the tricks and twists of the art, which are seldom met with in actual wrestling, but he who has well and carefully trained himself in one or two of them, and watches keenly for an opportunity of practising them.
-- Demetrius the Cynic		 
If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.
-- W. Edwards Deming		 
It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best.
-- W. Edwards Deming		 
We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government.
-- Democratic National Platform of 1892		 
Today's Democratic Party knows our children's education is not complete unless they learn good values. We applaud the efforts of the Clinton-Gore Administration to promote character education in our schools. Teaching good values, strong character, and the responsibilities of citizenship must be an essential part of American education.
-- Democratic Party Platform of 1996		 
People sometimes rationalize their greed by saying that it is all for the good of their children but this is nothing but an excuse they use to make their despicable actions appear respectable and praiseworthy.
-- Democritus		 
There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.
-- Demosthenes		 
There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm.
-- Demosthenes		 
Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.
-- Demosthenes		 
There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.
-- Daniel Dennett		 
Note, however, that trying to ban guns because of strong moral disapproval of them or because of claims that they are 'scary' or that they may be used in crimes would not constitute a 'compelling state interest' any more than an attempt to restrain publication of a book on moral grounds would be. The concept of a 'compelling state interest' cannot swallow up the very right guaranteed in the first place.
-- Brannon P. Denning		 
When courts fail to engage in oversight or even distort the Constitution to rationalize the ultra vires actions of government, and when academics and political activists aid and abet them in this activity by devising ingenious rationalizations for ignoring the Constitution’s words, they are playing a most dangerous game. For they are putting at risk the legitimacy of the lawmaking process and risking the permanent disaffection of significant segments of the people.
-- Brannon P. Denning		 
Standing armies consist of professional soldiers who owe their livelihood and income to the government. Unlike civilians who render periodic service in local militia, professional soldiers do not own property and therefore do not have any source of income other than the government’s military paymaster. Thus, they are more likely to serve the government’s interests, regardless of whether its leaders are dishonest and corrupt or not. In fact, standing armies may even promote rapacious foreign or domestic policies if such policies enrich the army. In contrast, arms bearing, property owning citizen militiamen have a stake in the health of the republic as a whole and can be trusted to act in the republic’s best interests, whether those interests call for action in support of or against the political leadership of the nation.
-- Anthony J. Dennis		 
The Nazis, for example, used a national firearms registration system eventually to confiscate all guns and, as they deemed necessary, to execute gun owners.
-- Anthony J. Dennis		 
It comes as news to most people to learn that practically all important ethical teachers -- Moses, Aristotle, Jesus, Mohammed, and Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance -- have denounced lending at interest as usury and as morally wrong.
-- Lawrence Dennis		 
We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
-- Max DePree		 
Ultimately, however, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, a powerful bureaucratic class is in the same relation to commerce as was the scorpion in Aesop to the dog on whose back he crossed the river. They will destroy commerce and establish socialism, even if it kills them, because that is their nature.
-- John Derbyshire		 
Rights are not self-evident. They're not unalienable. They are subject to modification just like anything else.
-- Alan Dershowitz		 
Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner – the know-nothing fundamentalist right – it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well.
-- Alan Dershowitz		 
Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.
-- Alan Dershowitz		 
We, the People of this country, have no unalienable rights... all our rights are subject to modification... the Constitution of the United States of America is nothing more than a piece of paper and... our government should not be restrained by the Constitution because our government can do good things for people.
-- Alan Dershowitz (False)		 
Our First Amendment expresses a far different calculus for regulating speech than for regulating nonexpressive conduct and that is as it should be. The right to swing your fist should end at the tip of my nose, but your right to express your ideas should not necessarily end at the lobes of my ears.
-- Alan Dershowitz		 
Imagine a legal system in which lawyers were equated with the clients they defended and were condemned for representing controversial or despised clients.
-- Alan Dershowitz		 
You know, being black doesn’t give you a license to call people racist any more than being Jewish gives you license to call people anti-Semitic.
-- Alan Dershowitz		 
If we move away from the American tradition of lawyers defending those with whom they vehemently disagree -- as we temporarily did during the McCarthy period -- we weaken our commitment to the rule of law... So beware of an approach which limits advocacy to that which is approved by the standards of political correctness.
-- Alan Dershowitz		 
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
-- Rene Descartes		 
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
-- Rene Descartes		 
In 1983 $21 billion was spent in agricultural subsidies—almost equal to the net income of all American farmers.
-- Patrick Detches		 
The object of any tyrant would be to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.
-- Sir Patrick Devlin		 
Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.
-- Sir James Dewar		 
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.
-- John Dewey (False)		 
The teacher is engaged not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.... In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God.
-- John Dewey		 
The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.
-- John Dewey		 
Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large.
-- John Dewey		 
Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either/Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities.
-- John Dewey		 
Our Founders warned us that all republics have eventually fallen into tyranny -- the only difference being the relative timeline of each republic's descent. ... From the summer of 1787 when our Framers deliberated over their magnificent Constitution, we have recognized that the clear statement and equal application of the Law is among the most critical duties of any government. If we allow ourselves to lose this, we may as well be back in ancient Rome, subject to the whim of every petty tyrant in the taxing bureau or the zoning board. For it doesn't matter whether the regulator's foot is shod in a jack boot or a Roman sandal; if he can hold you down with that boot upon your neck, then we are no longer in the America that our Founding Fathers intended for us.
-- John F. Di Leo		 
Conscience warns us before it reproaches us.
-- Comtesse Diane		 
It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.
-- Dick Cavett		 
Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.
-- Charles Dickens		 
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don´t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if anything is to be got by it.
-- Charles Dickens		 
Indeed nations, in general, are not apt to think until they feel; and therefore nations in general have lost their liberty: For as violations of the rights of the governed, are commonly not only specious, but small at the beginning, they spread over the multitude in such a manner, as to touch individuals but slightly. Thus they are disregarded. The power or profit that arises from these violations centering in few persons, is to them considerable. For this reason the governors having in view their particular purposes, successively preserve an uniformity of conduct for attaining them. They regularly increase the first injuries, till at length the inattentive people are compelled to perceive the heaviness of their burthens -- They begin to complain and inquire — but too late. They find their oppressors so strengthened by success, and themselves so entangled in examples of express authority on the part of their rulers, and of tacit recognition on their own part, that they are quite confounded: for millions entertain no other idea of the legality of power, than it is founded on the exercise of power.
-- John Dickenson		 
Who are a free people? Not those over whom government is exercised, but those who live under a government so constitutionally checked and controlled that proper provision is made against its being otherwise exercised.
-- John Dickenson		 
Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.
-- Emily Dickinson		 
Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops... at all.
-- Emily Dickinson		 
Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness... We claim them from a higher source -- from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us; exist with us; and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives.
-- John Dickinson		 
Don't let your mouth write no check that your tail can't cash.
-- Bo Diddley		 
Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.
-- Denis Diderot		 
To brand man with infamy, and let him free, is an absurdity that peoples our forests with assassins. [Fr., Rendre l'homme infame, et le laisser libre, est une absurdite qui peuple nos forets d'assassins.]
-- Denis Diderot		 
Freedom includes the right to say what others may object to and resent…The essence of citizenship is to be tolerant of strong and provocative words.
-- John G. Diefenbaker		 
I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.
-- John G. Diefenbaker		 
Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong.
-- John G. Diefenbaker		 
Banks do not have an obligation to promote the public good.
-- Alexander Dielius		 
If you say to people that they, as a matter of fact, can’t protect their conversations, in particular their political conversations, I think you take a long step toward making a transition from a free society to a totalitarian society.
-- Whitfield Diffie		 
It is no coincidence that some of America’s most lethargic industries—steel, footwear, rubber, textiles—are also among the most heavily protected.
-- Thomas DiLorenzo		 
The theory of natural monopoly is an economic fiction. No such thing as a 'natural' monopoly has ever existed. The history of the so-called public utility concept is that the late 19th and early 20th-century 'utilities' competed vigorously, and like all other industries, they did not like competition. They first secured government-sanctioned monopolies, and then, with the help of a few influential economists, they constructed an ex post facto rationalization for their monopoly power. ... The theory of natural monopoly is a 19th-century economic fiction that defends 19th-century (or 18th-century, in the case of the U.S. Postal Service) monopolistic privileges and has no useful place in the 21st-century American economy.
-- Thomas J. DiLorenzo		 
On February 27, black-uniformed men of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wearing “coal scuttle” helmets and carrying German-made machine pistols attacked the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Fifty years earlier, in January 1943, blackuniformed SS men wearing “coal scuttle” helmets and carrying German-made machine pistols attacked the Jewish compound in Warsaw, Poland. The BATF men were searching for illegal weapons reported by a paid informant to be in the Branch Davidian Compound. The SS men were searching for illegal weapons reported by a paid informant to be in the Warsaw ghetto. Reports from Texas indicate the Branch Davidians kept to themselves and harmed no one outside their compound prior to the BATF assault. History tells us the Jews kept to themselves and harmed no one outside the Warsaw ghetto prior to the SS assault. The U.S. broadcast news media tell us that the Branch Davidians practice contemptible sexual rituals involving young children, so they are an evil religious cult. Nazi news media told the German populace that the Jews practiced contemptible sexual rituals involving children, so they were an evil religion. The BATF invited the U.S. news media to document the BATF assault to show the American public how dangerous the Branch Davidians are. The SS had propagandists documents its assault to show the German public how dangerous the Jews were. Four BATF men were killed and 16 wounded in the initial assault on the Branch Davidian compound. Eleven SS men were killed and an unrecorded number wounded in the initial assault on the Warsaw ghetto. After the initial assault, the BATF men magnanimously arranged a truce so children could be evacuated from the Branch Davidian Compound (and they could tend to their casualties). After their initial assault, the SS men magnanimously arranged a truce so children could be evacuated from the Warsaw ghetto compound (and they could tend to their casualties). The BATF called up military units with armored vehicles to finish off the Branch Davidian compound after encountering fierce resistance against the initial assault. The SS called up military units with armored vehicles to finish off the Warsaw ghetto after encountering fierce resistance against the initial assault. Fifty years have passed, but little has changed.
-- John D. Dingell, III		 
The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
-- Diogenes		 
Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.
-- Dionysius, the Elder		 
A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money.
-- Everett Dirksen		 
The New York Times is deliberately pitched to the liberal point of view.
-- Herman Dismore		 
Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
For you see, the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
I repeat... that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that, from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
Upon the education of the people of this country, the fate of this country depends.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments’ plans.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
Truth travels slowly, but it will reach even you in time.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection, it is plunder.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valueable, and your freedom less complete.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
Demagogues and agitators are very unpleasant, they are incidental to a free and constitutional country, and you must put up with these inconveniences or do without many important advantages.
-- Benjamin Disraeli		 
[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own.
-- Milovan Djilas		 
The notion of editorial independence from ownership only dates back to the 1930s. Prior to that time the media was openly biased and that includes the Press that the founding fathers dealt with. Some of the founders like Hamilton and Franklin had actually ran media outlets that were very biased. You used to have things like Newspapers that openly proclaimed they were a Democratic or Republican or Whig or a Federalist newspaper right on the banner. The concept of an independent and allegedly neutral press was and still is mainly pushed by people from the left who do NOT want anything remotely neutral, but who instead want to make sure those "evil" business interests don't have a means of getting their side aired without it being filtered by their idea of what a neutral press consists of.
-- John Dobbins		 
The GOP has as much commitment to small government as the Democratic Party has to a strong national defense.
-- John Dobbins		 
Conform and be dull.
-- James Frank Dobie		 
To those who find it difficult to understand how a mind can be imprisoned, my puny indictment of the communist movement before the Tydings Committee may have seemed slight indeed, for I no doubt gave some comfort to the Party by my negative approach. But it takes time to “unbecome” a Communist.
-- Dr. Bella Dodd		 
What I had failed to understand was that the security I felt in the Party was that of a group and that affection in that strange communist world is never a personal emotion. You were loved or hated on the basis of group acceptance, and emotions were stirred or dulled by propaganda. That propaganda was made by the powerful people at the top. That is why ordinary Communists get along well with their groups: they think and feel together and work toward a common goal.
-- Dr. Bella Dodd		 
I was at last beginning to see how ignorant I had become, how long since I had read anything except Party literature. I thought of our bookshelves stripped of books questioned by the Party, how when a writer was expelled from the Party his books went, too. I thought of the systematic rewriting of Soviet history, the revaluation, and in some cases the blotting out of any mention of such persons as Trotsky. I thought of the successive purges. Suddenly I too wanted the answers to the questions Senator Hickenlooper was asking and I wanted the truth. I found myself hitting at the duplicity of the Communist Party.
-- Dr. Bella Dodd		 
The process of completely freeing oneself emotionally from being a Communist is a thing no outsider can understand. The group thinking and group planning and the group life of the Party had been a part of me for so long that it was desperately difficult for me to be a person again. ... But I had begun the process of “unbecoming” a Communist. It was a long and painful process, much like that of a polio victim who has to learn to walk all over again. I had to learn to think. I had to learn to love. I had to drain the hate and frenzy from my system. I had to dislodge the self and the pride that had made me arrogant, made me feel that I knew all the answers. I had to learn that I knew nothing. There were many stumbling blocks in this process.
-- Dr. Bella Dodd		 
I think the Communist conspiracy is merely a branch of a much bigger conspiracy! … I would certainly like to find out who is really running things.
-- Dr. Bella Dodd		 
There had been many things I had not really understood. I had regarded the Communist Party as a poor man’s party, and thought the presence of certain men of wealth within it accidental. I now saw this was no accident. I regarded the Party as a monolithic organization with the leadership in the National Committee and the National Board. Now I saw this was only a facade placed there by the movement to create the illusion of the poor man’s party; it was in reality a device to control the “common man” they so raucously championed.
-- Dr. Bella Dodd		 
We in the Party had been told in 1945, after the publication of the Duclos letter, that the Party in the United States would have a difficult role to play. Our country, we were told, would be the last to be taken by the Communists; the Party in the United States would often find itself in opposition not only to the interests of our government, but even against the interests of our own workers. Now I realized that, with the best motives and a desire to serve the working people of my country, I, and thousands like me, had been led to a betrayal of these very people. I now saw that I had been poised on the side of those who sought the destruction of my own country. I thought of an answer Pop Mindel, of the Party’s Education Bureau, had once given me in reply to the question whether the Party would oppose the entry of our boys into the Army. I had asked this question at a time when the Communists were conducting a violent campaign for peace, and it seemed reasonable to me to draw pacifist conclusions. Pop Mindel sucked on his pipe and with a knowing look in his eyes said: “Well, if we keep our members from the Army, then where will our boys learn to use weapons with which to seize power?” I realized how the Soviets had utilized Spain as a preview of the revolution to come. Now other peoples had become expendable — the Koreans, North and South, the Chinese soldiers, and the American soldiers. I found myself praying, “God, help them all.” What now became clear to me was the collusion of these two forces: the Communists with their timetable for world control, and certain mercenary forces in the free world bent on making profit from blood. But I was alone with these thoughts and had no opportunity to talk over my conclusions with friends.
-- Dr. Bella Dodd		 
Our whole political system rests on the distinction between constitutional and other laws. The former are the solemn principles laid down by the people in its ultimate sovereignty; the latter are regulations made by its representatives within the limits of their authority, and the courts can hold unauthorized and void any act which exceeds those limits. The courts can do this because they are maintaining against the legislature the fundamental principles which the people themselves have determined to support, and they can do it only so long as the people feel that the constitution is something more sacred and enduring than ordinary laws, something that derives its force from a higher authority.
-- Walter F. Dodd		 
A clique of US industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. … Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there.
-- William E. Dodd		 
After fifty years as a Prohibitionist, I am more convinced than ever that we need a good party, not just good men and good women. Most public officials are united in the war against terrorism. They, like we, are outraged at the deaths of some 3,000 Americans on September 11. Yet, most are willing to give unqualified support to the traffic in liquor and tobacco in exchange for campaign cash. Those products jointly claim at least 600,000 American lives each year. Two hundred die each year from use of alcohol and tobacco for every one who died in the September 11 attacks. Need another reason for being a Prohibitionist?
-- Earl F. Dodge		 
It’s never more important to move slowly and carefully before granting the state new powers than in the wake of tragedies.
-- Brian Doherty		 
[M]onopoly profits exist over the long run only when the government guarantees them, as in utilities and cable. And for concentration of market power, no robber baron can hold a candle to the U.S. government.... The hugest concentration of market power in this country does not lie with the likes of Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates, but with government itself.... No private company, no matter how huge or wealthy, could possibly have as much widespread power over the function of American markets as government does. And this power is exercised with essential unseriousness.... And unlike business attempts to make money, which necessarily involve selling something to a willing consumer, government’s market manipulations require forcing people into situations -- whether paying for cars or food, paying for R&D or new technologies, or selling off a part of their company -- that they would not have wanted to be in but for the government’s ham-handed threat of force.... Nothing could serve the workings of the marketplace better than [government] leaving it.
-- Brian Doherty		 
The United States has no jurisdiction. No representative of administrative, judicial, military, or police authority of the United States may enter that zone without permission of the Secretary-General. In short: as long as the seat of the United Nations remains within the United States, the area occupied by the United Nations is considered as extraterritorial [separate from the United States] with full diplomatic privileges and immunities.
-- Louis Dolivet		 
Welfare rights are pseudo-rights: They rely on the force of law to take private property for the use of others without compensation and without consent. Public charity is forced charity; it is not a virtue but a vice.
-- James A. Dorn		 
...and by the way, Mr.Speaker, the Second Amendment is not for killing little ducks and leaving Huey and Dewey and Louie without an aunt and uncle. It's for hunting politicians, like in Grozny, and in the colonies in 1776, or when they take your independence away.
-- Robert Dornan		 
Free speech is essential to education, especially to a liberal education, which encourages the search for truths in art and science. If expression is restricted, the range of inquiry is also curtailed... The beneficiaries of a free society have a duty to pursue the truth and to protect the freedom of expression that makes possible the search for a new enlightenment.
-- Norman Dorsen		 
Individuality is freedom lived.
-- John Dos Passos		 
The reality is, if we tell the truth, we only have to tell the truth once. If you lie, you have to keep lying forever.
-- Rabbi Wayne Dosick		 
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky		 
It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky		 
Every member of the society spies on the rest, and it is his duty to inform against them. All are slaves and equal in their slavery... The great thing about it is equality... Slaves are bound to be equal.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky		 
The head of the powerful Jesuit Order (Father Pedro Arrupe) charged today (Sept. 27) that atheism constitutes a conspiracy that has infiltrated even the Roman Catholic Church and virtually controls international organizations, finance, and mass communications. … [Father Pedro Arrupe said that] “the new godless society operates in an extremely efficient manner, at least in its higher levels of leadership. It makes use of every possible means at its disposal, be they scientific, technical, social, or economic. It follows a perfectly mapped-out strategy. It holds almost complete sway in international organizations, in financial circles, in the field of mass communications: press, cinema, radio, and television.” … Father Arrupe, as head of the 36,000-member Jesuit Order, is considered to be one of the half-dozen most influential churchmen in the world, as indicated by his informal title of “Black Pope.”
-- Robert Doty		 
Yes; truth blends well with untruth. It is one of the maladies of our age, a sign of sheer nervousness, to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.
-- Norman Douglas		 
It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it invites a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it passes for acceptance of an idea.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The First Amendment makes confidence in the common sense of our people and in the maturity of their judgment the great postulate of our democracy.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
When a legislature undertakes to proscribe the exercise of a citizen's constitutional rights it acts lawlessly and the citizen can take matters into his own hands and proceed on the basis that such a law is no law at all.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Freedom of movement is the very essence of our free society -- once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publication, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. ... Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. ... fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes in the land.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The function of the prosecutor under the federal Constitution is not to tack as many skins of victims as possible against the wall. His function is to vindicate the rights of the people as expressed in the laws and give those accused of crime a fair trial.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires, and their continuation in office as essential to the preservation of the nation.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
These unwritten amenities have been in part responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits rather than hushed, suffocating silence.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order, to efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and the like.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The struggle is always between the individual and his sacred right to express himself and…the power structure that seeks conformity, suppression and obedience.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. It is one of the great landmarks in men’s struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.
-- Justice William O. Douglas		 
The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.
-- William O. Douglas		 
But our society -- unlike most in the world -- presupposes that freedom and liberty are in a frame of reference that makes the individual, not government, the keeper of his tastes, beliefs, and ideas; that is the philosophy of the First Amendment; and it is this article of faith that sets us apart from most nations in the world.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Heresy trials are foreign to our Constitution. Men may believe what they cannot prove. They may not be put to the proof of their religious doctrines or beliefs. Religious experiences which are as real as life to some may be incomprehensible to others.
-- William O. Douglas		 
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Among the liberties of citizens that are guaranteed are ... the right to believe what one chooses, the right to differ from his neighbor, the right to pick and choose the political philosophy he likes best, the right to associate with whomever he chooses, the right to join groups he prefers ...
-- William O. Douglas		 
I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views – towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues – has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform…not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?
-- William O. Douglas		 
The First and Fourteenth Amendments say that Congress and the States shall make “no law” which abridges freedom of speech or of the press. In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that “no law” does not mean what it says, that “no law” is qualified to mean “some” laws. I cannot take this step.
-- William O. Douglas		 
A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.
-- William O. Douglas		 
The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged.
-- William O. Douglas		 
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
The non-producers now receive the larger share of what those who labor produce. The result is natural. Discontent culminates in exactly the same ratio that intelligence sustains aspiration.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
I have no sympathy for the narrow, selfish notion of economy which assumes that every crumb of bread which goes into the mouth of one class is so much taken from the mouths of another class.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
He who would be free must strike the first blow.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated? ... Primarily, it is a question less for man than for God -- less for human intellect than for the laws of nature to solve. It assumes that nature has erred; that the law of liberty is a mistake; that freedom, though a natural want of the human soul, can only be enjoyed at the expense of human welfare, and that men are better off in slavery than they would or could be in freedom; that slavery is the natural order of human relations, and that liberty is an experiment. What shall be done with them? Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting, and indefatigable work, into which the whole heart is put.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Any one having a white face, and being so disposed, could stop us, and subject us to examination. ... When I get there [in Pennsylvania], I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
... and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
What is possible for me is possible for you.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
-- Frederick Douglass		 
Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document!
-- Frederick Douglass		 
We must protect the freedoms of even those who hate us, and that we may find objectionable. If we fail in this task, we become victims of the precedents we create.
-- Judge Robert Doumar		 
History teaches us the unfortunate lesson that cultural values supplant constitutional rights whenever the cultural elite consider a right too burdensome to suit the needs of the moment. The outlandish pronouncement in Dred Scott "that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit," the shameful court-approved internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the separate but equal doctrine that officially existed until 1954 are all examples of the evils that result when cultural values are given more weight than constitutional rights.
-- Robert Dowlut		 
Judicial minds have systematically rejected arguments that clashed with their ideologies. Consequently, the forum of last resort has not checked the excesses of the executive and legislative branches.
-- Robert Dowlut		 
Because this right [of self-defense] cannot be effectively exercised with bare hands, the right to keep and bear arms is the only efficient way to secure the fundamental right of self-defense.
-- Robert Dowlut		 
[R]estricting arms to the military and police eviscerates the principle that power should flow from the people to government, and turns the government into a master rather than a servant.
-- Robert Dowlut		 
Gun control stems from racist roots, and ... it undermines feminism by send[ing] women the message that they should not use force to defend themselves.
-- Robert Dowlut		 
[W]e continue to evolve a cute little concept of a changing legal accommodation named the “Living Constitution Theory” which is only a perversion stating, “To heck with what our Constitution says; we in power will twist it to suit our ideas anytime and every time we so choose.”
-- Dr. Jack Down		 
The federal government has turned policing into policing for profit.
-- Stephen Downing		 
I think it might be important to point out that this country is a one-party country. Half of that party is called Republican and half is called Democrat. It doesn’t make any difference. All the really good ideas belong to the Libertarians.
-- Hugh Downs		 
You will ruin no more lives as you ruined mine. You will wring no more hearts as you wrung mine. I will free the world of a poisonous thing. Take that, you hound, and that! -- and that! -- and that! -- and that!
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle		 
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle		 
When books are challenged, restricted, removed, or banned, an atmosphere of suppression exists…. The fear of the consequences of censorship is as damaging as, or perhaps more damaging than, the actual censorship attempt. After all, when a published work is banned, it can usually be found elsewhere. Unexpressed ideas, unpublished works, unpurchased books are lost forever.
-- Robert P. Doyle		 
Some methodological atheists formulate the principle by saying that the burden of proof is always on any person making an existence claim, since, from a logical point of view, existence claims are only capable of proof, not disproof. No one has ever proven the nonexistence of Santa Claus, or elves, or unicorns, or anything else, simply because the very logic of an unrestricted existential proposition prohibits its disproof. It is impossible to go all over the universe and show that, for example, there are no elves anywhere. For this reason, rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of all those things which have never been shown to exist. That is why we all regard it rational to deny the existence of Santa Claus, elves, unicorns, etc. And since God is in that same category, having never been shown to exist, it follows that rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of God.
-- Theodore M. Drange		 
If Congress can determine what constitutes the general welfare and can appropriate money for its advancement, where is the limitation to carrying into execution whatever can be effected by money?
-- William Drayton		 
Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.
-- Peter Drucker		 
The most may err as grossly as the few.
-- John Dryden		 
We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what they help distribute to the public; by which means a falsehood once received from a famed writer becomes traditional to posterity.
-- John Dryden		 
I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
-- John Dryden		 
Of all the tyrannies on human kind / the worst is that which persecutes the mind.
-- John Dryden		 
War is the trade of Kings.
-- John Dryden		 
Ill habits gather by unseen degrees -- As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
-- John Dryden		 
Better shun the bait than struggle in the snare.
-- John Dryden		 
The love of liberty with life is given, And life itself the inferior gift of Heaven.
-- John Dryden		 
O freedom, first delight of human kind!
-- John Dryden		 
It is the growing custom to narrow control, concentrate power, disregard and disfranchise the public; and assuming that certain powers by divine right of money-raising or by sheer assumption, have the power to do as they think best without consulting the wisdom of mankind.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois		 
The cost of liberty is less than the cost of repression.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois		 
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois		 
Gun control has not worked in D.C. The only people who have guns are criminals. We have the strictest gun laws in the nation and one of the highest murder rates. It's quicker to pull your Smith and Wesson than to dial 911 if you're being robbed.
-- Lt. Lowell Duckett		 
There can be no peace on earth as long as there is war in love.
-- Dieter Duhm		 
Somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor.
-- John Foster Dulles		 
Of all the tasks of government, the most basic is to protect its citizens from violence.
-- John Foster Dulles		 
Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
-- Alexandre Dumas		 
The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a "psychological confession" on their part. In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive.
-- Wayne Dunn		 
There was a time when Christians took faith as seriously as Mid-Eastern Muslims currently do: the Medieval Era.
-- Wayne Dunn		 
The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a 'psychological confession' on their part.  In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish -- they're self-destructive.
-- Wayne Dunn		 
An appeal is when you ask one court to show its contempt for another court.
-- Finley Peter Dunne		 
There exist in the world only two great parties; that of those who prefer to live from the produce of their labor or of their property, and that of those who prefer to live on the labor or the property of others.
-- Charles Dunoyer		 
The concept of a Supreme Being who childishly demands to be constantly placated by prayers and sacrifice and dispenses justice like some corrupt petty judge whose decisions may be swayed by a bit of well-timed flattery should be relegated to the trash bin of history, along with the belief in a flat earth and the notion that diseases are caused by demonic possession. Ironically, the case for the involuntary retirement of God may have been best stated by one Saul or Paul of Tarsus, a first-century tentmaker and Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin, who wrote, 'When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things' (I Corinthians 13:11). Those words are no less relevant today than they were two thousand years ago.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
How wonderful the world might be if only we gave to each other all the love we claim to give to God, a thought which has been expressed time and time again, yet it still manages to resound with a poignance that is almost painful. Such a world can be ours, sisters and brothers. Let us work together to achieve it.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being... The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and new -- the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent with the promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of 'love thy neighbor' will finally be achieved.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
I steadfastly maintain that only with the complete, irrevocable rejection of God and the supernatural will humankind truly begin to live. Rather than producing a feeling of despair, the decision to embrace atheism should result in an exhilarating, almost intoxicating sense of freedom, something akin to the experience of those American slaves who rejoiced upon hearing news of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Only the atheist is truly free.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
The history of Christianity has been largely written in blood, the blood of those whom it has sought to proselytize as well as that of those Christians who did not share the theology or ambitions of the male clerical oligarchy that has always wielded power in Christendom. This ignoble distinction is not nor has it ever been the exclusive prerogative of any particular denomination or sect; it is a living legacy of horror that is tragically common to the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox bodies of Christian churches.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
If the previous paragraphs [of 'A Religion For A New Age'] prove anything, it is that the Bible is not merely another book, an outmoded and archaic book, or even an extremely influential book; it has been and remains an incredibly dangerous book. It and the various Christian churches which are parasitic upon it have been directly responsible for most of the wars, persecutions and outrages which humankind has perpetrated upon itself over the past two thousand years.
-- John J. Dunphy		 
A liberal's like to be lax\\When recommending a tax.\\With a glut in his heart\\And his brain low a quart,\\He will give you\\the shirts off our backs.
-- F. R. Duplantier		 
If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.
-- Will Durant		 
In my youth, I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
-- Will Durant		 
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.
-- Will Durant		 
Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.
-- Will Durant		 
[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
-- Will Durant		 
Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt -- particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms.
-- Will Durant		 
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.
-- Will Durant		 
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.
-- Will Durant		 
Why doesn't everybody leave everybody else the hell alone?
-- Jimmy Durante		 
The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all.
-- Friedrich Durrenmatt		 
Criminal lawyer. Or is that redundant?
-- Will Durst		 
I did not use paint, I made myself up morally.
-- Eleanora Duse		 
Unless a crime is specifically named in the constitution, treason and bribery, impeachments like indictments can only be instituted for crimes committed against the statutory law of the United States.
-- Theodore William Dwight		 
Hamilton's whole monetary policy is based on unconstitutional grounds and unsound reasoning, and fraudulent statements. His policies were fought through the whole public career of Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph and many another truly great lovers of Republican Government. His policies have proved to be more destructive of our independent and democratic form of government than the old subjugation of the Colonies by Great Britain. The deliberations in Congress over Hamilton's Bank Bill, and the opinions of members of The Cabinet show the intensity of feeling between the private money interests and those supporting the Constitution. History records that the “money changers” have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.
-- Olive Cushing Dwinell		 
‘Balanced’ is a code for ‘denied’: a right to free speech that must be ‘balanced’ against so exhaustive a list of other supposed values means a right that can be exercised only when those in power judge that the speech in question is innocuous to them.
-- Ronald Dworkin		 
O liberty, Parent of happiness, celestial born When the first man became a living soul; His sacred genius thou.
-- Sir Edward Dyer		 
I am appalled at the extensive evidence indicating that there is today in the UN among the American employees there, the greatest concentration of communists that this Committee has ever encountered. … These people occupy high positions. They have very high salaries and almost all of these people have, in the past, been employees in the U.S. government in high and sensitive positions.
-- James O. Eastland		 
The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force.
-- Max Eastman		 
At Waco, was there really an urgency to get those people out of the compound at that particular time? Was the press going to make it look heroic for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms? At Ruby Ridge, there was one guy in a cabin at the top of the mountain. Was it necessary for federal agents to go up there and shoot a 14-year-old in the back and shoot a woman with a child in her arms? What kind of mentality does that?
-- Clint Eastwood		 
Abuse of power isn't limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we’re not vigilant.
-- Clint Eastwood		 
A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement.
-- Abba Eban		 
History teaches us that men and nations only behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
-- Abba Eban		 
Let us remind ourselves that in the Soviet Union the road to medical-care hell was paved with the same good intentions. ... At the end of the 20th century, Russia was infamous for having one of the worst health-care systems in the world.
-- Anna Ebeling		 
Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny.
-- Richard M. Ebeling		 
In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process -- learning the same "official history," the same "civic virtues," the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the independent soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political authorities wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was worship of the nation -- state and obedience to the Duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite. We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the "robber barons" of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn of the century; that wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman.
-- Richard M. Ebeling		 
Government is, and always has been, the greatest criminal threat to the peaceful members of society.
-- Richard M. Ebeling		 
Who is the fascist? Individualism and the political philosophy of limited government is not only inconsistent with but is the exact opposite of fascism and Nazism. Under fascism and Nazism, the state reigns supreme with absolute power over everyone and all forms of property. It can well be asked: who is the fascist, when the president of the United States and many Democrats and Republicans in congress call for expanded authority for the FBI and other federal security agencies to intrude into the lives of the American citizenry? Who is the fascist, when the call is made for increased power for the FBI to undertake “roving wiretapping” or have easier access to the telephone and credit-card records of the general population? Who is the fascist, when the proposal is made to make it easier for the FBI to investigate and infiltrate any political organization or association because the government views it as a potential terrorist danger?
-- Richard M. Ebeling		 
That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money.
-- Marriner Stoddard Eccles		 
This article will probably be photocopied and passed around the offices of exactly the same organizations that queue up to denounce copyright theft.
-- The Economist		 
For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal.
-- Sir Arthur Eddington		 
It is, of course, true that if we continue to lose our freedoms, concentration camps on U.S. soil would eventually become a reality.
-- Thomas R. Eddlem		 
One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole. We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy.
-- Ottmar Edenhofer		 
If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
Restless is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project (Muscle Shoals Dam) nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
There is no expedient to which the average person will not go to avoid the hard work of thinking.
-- Thomas A. Edison		 
We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists. ... We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists.
-- Communist Party Education Workers Congress		 
Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.
-- Bob Edwards		 
The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of the people.
-- David Edwards		 
We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich		 
That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing -- the truly democratic thing about it -- is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich		 
You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
-- John Ehrlichman		 
Government of the self was the original basis for republican government, reflecting the view that civil society was much more than politics. Society was made up of men and women who gave order to their lives by entering into associations on a voluntary basis, quite apart from government, for all the various reasons of fellowship, philanthrophy, faith and commerce.
-- Hans L. Eicholz		 
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
-- Albert Einstein		 
For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
-- Albert Einstein		 
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.
-- Albert Einstein		 
As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.... No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The important thing is never to stop questioning.
-- Albert Einstein		 
It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses.
-- Albert Einstein		 
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
-- Albert Einstein		 
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
-- Albert Einstein		 
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
-- Albert Einstein		 
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
-- Albert Einstein		 
To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light, but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Today's problems cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
-- Albert Einstein		 
By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The highest destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein		 
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
-- Albert Einstein		 
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking that we have done so far, has created problems we cannot solve at the level of thinking at which we created them.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.
-- Albert Einstein		 
As the circle of knowledge expands, so does the Sphere of darkness that encompasses it.
-- Albert Einstein		 
How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place even I would be an ardent patriot.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Force always attracts men of low morality.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The strength of the constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are constitutional rights secure.
-- Albert Einstein		 
I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine.  The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
-- Albert Einstein		 
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
-- Albert Einstein		 
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Why does this applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
-- Albert Einstein		 
The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
-- Albert Einstein		 
Free is not the same as free and easy.
-- Larry Eisenberg		 
The free world must now prove itself worthy of its own past.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
It is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedom’s defenses are found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed—else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
So long as we govern our nation by the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights, we can be sure that our nation will grow in strength and wisdom and freedom.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Why are we proud [to be American]? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend -- or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
All of us have heard this term "preventive war" since the earliest days of Hitler. ... A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war. ... I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Americans, indeed all freemen, remember that in the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
I developed a practice which, so far as I know, I have never violated. The practice is to avoid public mention of any name unless it can be done with favorable intent and connotation; reserve all criticism for the private conference; speak only good in public.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They'll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower		 
It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school.
-- Joycelyn Elders		 
There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.
-- George Eliot		 
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
-- George Eliot		 
Blessed is the person who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
-- George Eliot		 
The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.
-- T. S. Eliot		 
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
-- T. S. Eliot		 
The sea, as well as the air, is a free and common thing to all; and a particular nation cannot pretend to have the right to the exclusion of all others, without violating the rights of nature and public usage.
-- Elizabeth I		 
I say legalize drugs because I want to see less drug abuse, not more. And I say legalize drugs because I want to see the criminals put out of business.
-- Edward Ellison		 
Everything is backwards;\\ everything is upside down.\\ Doctors destroy health,\\ lawyers destroy justice,\\ universities destroy knowledge,\\ governments destroy freedom,\\ the major media destroy information,\\ and religions destroy spirituality.
-- Michael Ellner		 
The Thirteen States are Thirteen Sovereign bodies.
-- Oliver Ellsworth		 
Pity the poor, wretched, timid soul, too faint hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the songs of the damned, 'I cannot resist, I have too much to lose, they might take my property or confiscate my earnings, what would my family do, how would they survive?' He hides behind pretended family responsibility, failing to see that the most glorious legacy that we can bequeath to our posterity is liberty!
-- W. Vaughn Ellsworth		 
Wherever there’s a disagreement among Republicans, I’m for one of those disagreements. I’m all for it. The president’s with Russia? I’m with John McCain and Lindsey Graham, I’m for NATO! Why? [It’s a] wedge. Wedges have to be schisms, schisms have to be divides.
-- Rahm Emanuel		 
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
-- Rahm Emanuel		 
Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
We grant no dukedoms to the few,\\ We hold like rights and shall;\\ Equal on Sunday in the pew,\\ On Monday in the mall.\\ For what avail the plough or sail,\\ Or land, or life, if freedom fail?
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine Providence in behalf of the human race.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
The less government we have the better - the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had?
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Liberty is a slow fruit.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live as well as think.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
In dealing with the State, we ought to remember that its institutions are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man's expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail?
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Good men must not obey the laws too well.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Fame is proof that the people are gullible.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Persecution readily knits friendship between its victims.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
People only see what they are prepared to see.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
When you strike at a king, you must kill him.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson		 
The function of the censor is to censor. He has a professional interest in finding things to suppress.
-- Thomas I. Emerson		 
It is frequently said that speech that is intentionally provocative and therefore invites physical retaliation can be punished or suppressed. Yet, plainly no such general proposition can be sustained. Quite the contrary…. The provocative nature of the communication does not make it any the less expression. Indeed, the whole theory of free expression contemplates that expression will in many circumstances be provocative and arouse hostility. The audience, just as the speaker, has an obligation to maintain physical restraint.
-- Thomas I. Emerson		 
The right to freedom of expression is justified first of all as the right of an individual purely in his capacity as an individual. It derives from the widely accepted premise of Western thought that the proper end of man is the realization of his character and potentialities as a human being.
-- Thomas I. Emerson		 
The Right of all members of society to form their own beliefs and communicate them freely to others must be regarded as an essential principle of a democratically organized society.
-- Thomas I. Emerson		 
Suppression of expression conceals the real problems confronting a society and diverts public attention from the critical issues. It is likely to result in neglect of the grievances which are the actual basis of the unrest, and this prevent their correction.
-- Thomas I. Emerson		 
Every man – in the development of his own personality – has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential nature.
-- Thomas I. Emerson		 
We're bending the law as far as we can to ban an entirely new class of guns.
-- Rahm Emmanuel		 
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
-- Rahm Emmanuel		 
The task of government in this enlightened time does not extend to actually dealing with problems. Solving problems might put bureaucrats out of work. No, the task of government is to make it look as though problems have been solved, while continuing to keep the maximum number of consultants and bureaucrats employed dealing with them.
-- Bob Emmers		 
That is true liberty, which bears a pure and firm breast.
-- Quintus Ennius		 
To open his lips is crime in a plain citizen.
-- Quintus Ennius		 
He hath freedom whoso beareth a clean and constant heart within.
-- Quintus Ennius		 
What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name.  It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda'.  It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about.  When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about.  And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'. 
-- Brian Eno		 
Only the educated are free.
-- Epictetus		 
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
-- Epictetus		 
Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.
-- Epictetus		 
Freedom and slavery, the one is the name of virtue, and the other of vice, and both are acts of the will.
-- Epictetus		 
He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid.
-- Epictetus		 
The beginning of philosophy is the recognition of the conflict between opinions.
-- Epictetus		 
A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.
-- Epicurus		 
Freedom is the greatest fruit of self-sufficiency.
-- Epicurus		 
The term “Internationalism” has been popularized in recent years to cover an interlocking financial, political, and economic world force for the purpose of establishing a World Government. Today Internationalism is heralded from pulpit and platform as a “League of Nations” or a “Federated Union” to which the United States must surrender a definite part of its National Sovereignty. The World Government plan is being advocated under such alluring names as the “New International Order,” “The New World Order,” “World Union Now,” “World Commonwealth of Nations,” “World Community,” etc. All the terms have the same objective; however, the line of approach may be religious or political according to the taste or training of the individual.
-- Episcopal Church General Convention		 
America was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, not dictated duties. The Declaration of Independence states that every human being has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not state that he is born a slave to the needs of others.
-- Alex Epstein		 
While it would be silly and ungracious to insist that intelligent deliberation on public issues is nowhere found in modern communities, it would be naive to imagine that wise deliberation can survive the constant pounding from self-interested political behavior. Benevolence in public institutions has a short half-life no matter how noble its original intentions." and "Once [a] program is in place, its day-to-day administration falls into the hands of a professional cadre besieged by powerful interest groups whose influence grows as public interest wanes. . . . A slow process of disintegration and reconfiguration sets in, transforming and expanding a program from within.
-- Richard A. Epstein		 
The New Deal is inconsistent with the principles of limited government and with the constitutional provisions designed to secure that end.
-- Richard A. Epstein		 
It shall be unlawful for any public secondary school which receives Federal financial assistance and which has a limited open forum, to deny equal access or a fair opportunity to, or discriminate against, any students who wish to conduct a meeting within that limited open forum on the basis of the religious, political, philosophical, or other content of the speech at such meeting.
-- Equal Access Act		 
In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
-- Desiderius Erasmus		 
War is sweet to those who haven't tasted it.
-- Desiderius Erasmus		 
We will all be better citizens when voting records of our Congressmen are followed as carefully as scores of pro-football games.
-- Lou Erickson		 
When somebody lies, somebody loses.
-- Stephanie Ericsson		 
The American feels too rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.
-- Erik H. Erikson		 
When men can freely communicate their thoughts and their sufferings, real or imagined, their passions spend themselves in air, like gunpowder scattered upon the surface – but pent up by terrors, they work unseen, burst forth in a moment, and destroy everything in its course. Let reason be opposed to reason, and argument to argument, and every good government will be safe.
-- Thomas Erskine		 
The liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man would venture to write on any subject, however, pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other. From minds thus subdued by the fear of punishment, there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason.
-- Thomas Erskine		 
What is the fairest fruit of the English Tree of Liberty? The security of our rights and of the law, and that no man shall be brought to trial where there is a prejudice against him.
-- Thomas Erskine		 
A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it.
-- Senator Sam Ervin		 
... judicial verbicide is calculated to convert the Constitution into a worthless scrap of paper and to replace our government of laws with a judicial oligarchy.
-- Senator Sam Ervin		 
But this is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.
-- Euripides		 
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
-- Euripides		 
Once 'our people' get themselves into a position to make policy, they cease being 'our people'.
-- M. Stanton Evans		 
The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.
-- Bergan Evans		 
Freedom of speech and freedom of action [is meaningless] without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.
-- Bergan Evans		 
Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them.
-- Harold Evans		 
Freedom may come quickly in robes of peace, or after ages of conflict and war; but come it will, and abide it will, so long as the principles by which it was acquired are held sacred.
-- Edward Everett		 
Freedom may come quickly in robes of peace, or after ages of conflict and war; but come it will, and abide it will, so long as the principles by which it was acquired are held sacred.
-- Edward Everett		 
The man who stands upon his own soil, who feels, by the laws of the land in which he lives,--by the laws of civilized nations,--he is the rightful and exclusive owner of the land which he tills, is, by the constitution of our nature, under a wholesome influence, not easily imbibed from any other source.
-- Edward Everett		 
[P]ublic schooling often ends up to be little more than majoritarian domination of minority viewpoints.
-- Robert B. Everhart		 
I gave my life for freedom--This I know; For those who bade me fight had told me so.
-- William Norman Ewer		 
The government deficit is the difference between the amount of money the government spends and the amount it has the nerve to collect.
-- Sam Ewing		 
The information superhighway is a revolution that in years to come will transcend newspapers, radio, and television as an information source. Therefore, I think this is the time to put some restrictions on it.
-- Sen. James Exon		 
If you admit that to silence your opponent by force is to win an intellectual argument, then you admit the right to silence people by force.
-- Hans Eysenck		 
There is a great deal of self-will in the world, but very little genuine independence of character.
-- Frederick W. Faber		 
It would be equally reasonable to say that sheep are born carnivorous, and everywhere nibble grass.
-- Emile Faguet		 
An anarchist is an uncomprimising liberal.
-- Émile Faguet		 
When dealing with a legal matter - always remember that you are your own best advocate. No one will care as much about the case as you do. Use lawyers but remember - you must take primary responsibility for a successful outcome.
-- Grant D. Fairley		 
The existing order is breaking down at a very rapid rate, and the main uncertainty is whether mankind can exert a positive role in shaping a new world order or is doomed to await collapse in a passive posture. We believe a new order will be born no later than early in the next century and that the death throes of the old and the birth pangs of the new will be a testing time for the human species.
-- Richard A. Falk		 
Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.
-- Frantz Fanon		 
If you suppose that good intentions justify intruding on the lives and properties of your fellow citizens: Do you appreciate being the target of somebody else's good intentions, or haven't you had that particular dubious pleasure yet?
-- Cat Farmer		 
Besides, to lay and collect internal taxes in this extensive country must require a great number of congressional ordinances, immediately operation upon the body of the people; these must continually interfere with the state laws and thereby produce disorder and general dissatisfaction till the one system of laws or the other, operating upon the same subjects, shall be abolished.
-- Federal Farmer		 
The secret of all power is - save your force. If you want high pressure you must choke off waste.
-- Joseph Farrell		 
Putting free speech behind bars simply because it concerns prisoners sets a dangerous precedent. The court's decision makes clear that Arizona may not jail the Internet.
-- David Fathi		 
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
-- William Faulkner		 
What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not completed to the point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it and it works.
-- William Faulkner		 
We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
-- William Faulkner		 
What is a left-wing socialist but a Marxist without a gun?
-- Don Feder		 
The actual process of money creation takes place in commercial banks. As noted earlier, demand liabilities of commercial banks are money.
-- Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago		 
Because of 'fractional' reserve system, banks, as a whole, can expand our money supply several times, by making loans and investments.
-- Federal Reserve Bank of New York		 
Commercial banks create checkbook money whenever they grant a loan, simply by adding new deposit dollars in accounts on their books in exchange for a borrower's IOU.
-- Federal Reserve Bank of New York		 
Without the confidence factor, many believe a paper money system is liable to collapse eventually.
-- Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia		 
The decrease in purchasing power incurred by holders of money due to inflation imparts gains to the issuers of money...
-- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis		 
'Racism’ has been redefined to mean anyone opposing big government dependency welfare programs.
-- Bill Federer		 
Man is deeply vulnerable when faced with overwhelming evil. Instead of consolidating his energy to fight it, he wastes valuable time and effort puzzling over it, insisting it is not, cannot possibly be, what it seems.
-- Konnilyn G. Feig		 
Banning guns addresses a fundamental right of all Americans to feel safe.
-- Dianne Feinstein		 
I know the sense of helplessness that people feel. I know the urge to arm yourself because that's what I did. I was trained in firearms. I walked to the hospital when my husband was sick. I carried a concealed weapon and I made the determination if somebody was going to try and take me out, I was going to take them with me.
-- Dianne Feinstein		 
Censorship is advertising paid by the government.
-- Federico Fellini		 
To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.
-- Felson		 
Legislators like pork because it helps them get reelected. They are interested in administrative details because long tenure promotes narrow specialization. The constituent service racket allows lawmakers to ignore big problems by fixing small ones. In becoming ombudsman -- glorified errand boys, -- incumbents build up enough good will for most to survive even a watershed year like 1992. By ending congressional careerism, term limits will encourage attention to larger legislative issues. By changing the understanding of the legislator's role, term limits are probably the most effective single reform that can be imposed on Congress. And imposed it will have to be: While great majorities of the American people support term limits, lawmakers oppose them in even larger proportions. With a career Congress, voters face a dilemma: They do not like paying taxes to Washington and hoping to get them back in the form of pork and entitlements, but as long as the system is rigged, it makes sense to vote for the incumbent to maximize your own take. Congressmen face a similar dilemma: Take the easy road to reelection or face the often difficult choices of balancing local and national interests. Take away the career mindset and both representatives and voters can make choices based on the merits of each case. ... In fact, one of the biggest benefits of non-professional legislators is that they would be unlikely to join with the bureaucrats and special interests in blowing smoke at the voters.
-- Eric Felton		 
Censorship is a dangerous tool that is primarily used to suppress from those who would challenge oppression by the society and that state, and particularly victimizes minorities. [It] can never eliminate evil ideas, and so the best answer to bad speech is more speech.
-- Feminists Against Censorship		 
We are not liberated until we liberate others. So long as we need to control other people, however benign our motives, we are captive to that need. In giving them freedom, we free ourselves.
-- Marilyn Ferguson		 
Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.
-- Marilyn Ferguson		 
While outlining a not-yet-titled book about the emerging social alternatives, I thought again about the peculiar form of this movement; its atypical leadership, the patient intensity of its adherents, their unlikely successes. It suddenly struck me that in their sharing of strategies, their linkage, and their recognition of each other by subtle signals, the participants were not merely cooperating with one another. They were in collusion. It -- this movement -- is a conspiracy! … There are legions of conspirators. They are in corporations, universities, and hospitals, on the faculties of public schools, in factories and doctors’ offices, in state and federal agencies, on city councils, and the White House staff, in state legislatures, in volunteer organizations, in virtually all arenas of policy making in the country.
-- Marilyn Ferguson		 
Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine.
-- Victor Ferkiss		 
Governments have ever been known to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more.
-- Francisco Ferrer		 
We also need to encourage Americans to become more fiscally responsible themselves. We can do this by redesigning our tax system into an expenditure tax with a single flat rate. ... We have to substantially reduce the size and scope of the federal government, fundamentally increase the role of the states in choosing their own practices, and bring decision-making closer to the people, not to unelected administrators. These steps are crucial to getting our nation on a path of fiscal, political and constitutional responsibility.
-- Edwin Feulner		 
The best way to put more money in people's wallets is to leave it there in the first place.
-- Edwin Feulner		 
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-- Richard Feynman		 
There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
-- Richard Feynman		 
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
-- Richard Feynman		 
Most people know more about their congressmen via smear campaigns than they know about their own neighbor via conversations, and a lot of people know more about Britney Spears via tabloids than they know about their own congressmen via voting booklets. Does anyone else see the problem here?
-- Brock Fiant		 
Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.
-- Johann Gottlieb Fichte		 
You thus have no rights at all over our freedom of thought, you princes; no jurisdiction over that which is true or false; no right to determine the objects of our inquiry or to set limits to it; no right to hinder us from communicating the results, whether they be true or false, to whomever or however we wish.
-- Johann Gottlieb Fichte		 
Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices.  This is corruption in reality, give it whatever other name you please.
-- David Dudley Field, II		 
Freedom of the press and also of speech, assembly, and worship can persist as social forms and legal guarantees, while at the same time their functional realities can be gradually slipping away.
-- Marshall Field		 
If a blending of individualism and of cooperative participation is a prerequisite to a democratic solution of the problems of a society of free men, it must also be noted that an atmosphere of freedom is required if these problems are to be met constructively and as they arise.
-- Marshall Field		 
Here I close my opinion. I could not say less in view of questions of such gravity that go down to the very foundations of the government. If the provisions of the Constitution can be set aside by an Act of Congress, where is the course of usurpation to end? The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich; a war growing in intensity and bitterness.
-- Justice Stephen J. Field		 
When I'm not thanked at all, I'm thanked enough; I've done my duty, and I've done no more.
-- Henry Fielding		 
There is no zeal blinder than that which is inspired with a love of justice against offenders.
-- Henry Fielding		 
Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
-- W. C. Fields		 
Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our revolution. They existed before.
-- Millard Fillmore		 
Paradoxical as it may seem, men and women who are free to pursue individualism and material wealth turn out to be the most compassionate of all.
-- Financial Times		 
A criminal trial is not a search for truth. It is much too circumscribed for that. Rather, a trial is a formalized contest for the hearts and minds of a panel of twelve. It is a quest for a verdict in which information is selected and screened (we can almost say “processed”) before it is allowed to reach jurors.
-- Phillip Finch		 
...the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things.
-- Howard Fineman		 
I tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying.
-- Charles C. Finn		 
The world is so dreadfully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain.
-- Ronald Firbank		 
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
-- First Amendment in the Bill of Rights		 
A man may be born a jackass; but it is his business if he makes himself a double one.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
The public is hedged about by so many goddam bookkeepers that no time is left in which to produce. More time is spent in carrying out garbage than in carrying in food.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes — so check your value to the community.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
Social reform aims to improve the condition of the poor by worsening the condition of the rich.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.
-- Martin H. Fischer		 
Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.
-- Stanley Fish		 
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
-- Geoffrey Fisher		 
I believe [that William Graham Sumner] was one of the greatest professors we ever had at Yale, but I have drawn far away from his point of view, that of the old laissez faire doctrine. I remember he said in his classroom: 'Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist.' That amused his class very much, for he was as far from a revolutionary as you could expect. But I would like to say that if that time comes when there are two great parties, Anarchists and Socialists, then I am a Socialist.
-- Irving Fisher		 
Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess.
-- Irving Fisher		 
The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility.
-- John A. Fisher		 
The persecuting spirit has its origin morally in the disposition of man to domineer over his fellow creatures; intellectually, in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.
-- John Fiske		 
The idea of neutrality in the speech context not only requires that the state refrain from choosing among viewpoints, but also that it not structure public debate in such a way as to favor one viewpoint over another. The state must act as a high-minded parliamentarian, making certain that all viewpoints are fully and fairly heard.
-- Owen Fiss		 
Either you think – or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald		 
The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as, from 1933 onward, “political criminality” was given a much broader definition than ever before and most forms of dissent and criticism were gradually criminalized. The result was that more “laws” or lawlike measures were put on the books than ever.
-- Shelia Fitzpatrick		 
Socialism is the idea that violent force is an appropriate response to peaceful, voluntary exchange.
-- Frank J. Fleming		 
Let me write the songs of a nation - I don't care who writes its laws.
-- Andrew Fletcher		 
And I cannot see, why arms should be denied to any man who is not a slave, since they are the only true badges of liberty.
-- Andrew Fletcher		 
Censorship in any form, represents a lack of trust in the judgment of the individual. The passage of time provides the best perspective for sorting the wheat from the chaff.
-- Bruce E. Fleury		 
We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.
-- Abraham Flexner		 
There are some weapons that are just so dangerous that society has a right and the obligation even to take those weapons out of circulation.
-- Jim Florio		 
Fate is an open road, and all you can do is put your foot on the gas and Drive, Baby Drive.
-- Padraig Flynn		 
If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me.
-- Larry Flynt		 
The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.
-- B. C. Forbes		 
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
-- Malcolm S. Forbes		 
The Declaration of Independence, the words that launched our nation -- 1,300 words. The Bible, the word of God -- 773,000 words. The Tax Code, the words of politicians -- 7,000,000 words -- and growing!
-- Steve Forbes		 
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
-- Henry Ford		 
To do for the world more than the world does for you -- that is success.
-- Henry Ford		 
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
-- E. M. Forster		 
Two cheers for democracy; one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
-- E. M. Forster		 
Procedure is the bone structure of a democratic society. Our scheme of law affords great latitude for dissent and opposition. It compels wide tolerance not only for their expression but also for the organization of people and forces to bring about the acceptance of the dissenter’s claim….We have alternatives to violence.
-- Abe Fortas		 
Government…may not be hostile to any religion or to the advocacy of no-religion; and it may not aid, foster, or promote one religion or religious theory against another… The First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality…
-- Abe Fortas		 
Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent. And they must give it the respect and the latitude which they claim for themselves.
-- Abe Fortas		 
I should, indeed, prefer twenty men to escape death through mercy, than one innocent to be condemned unjustly.
-- Sir John Fortescue		 
Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
-- Harry Emerson Fosdick		 
Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.
-- Alan Dean Foster		 
Bankers have no right to establish a customary law among themselves, at the expence of other men.
-- Sir Michael Foster		 
No human government has a right to enquire into private opinions, to presume that it knows them, or to act on that presumption. Men are the best judges of the consequences of their own opinions, and how far they are likely to influence their actions; and it is most unnatural and tyrannical to say, “as you think, so must you act. I will collect the evidence of your future conduct from what I know to be your opinions.”
-- Charles James Fox		 
Opinions become dangerous to a state only when persecution makes it necessary for the people to communicate their ideas under the bond of secrecy.
-- Charles James Fox		 
Every attempt to gag the free expression of thought is an unsocial act against society. That is why judges and juries who try to enforce such laws make themselves ridiculous.
-- Jay Fox		 
“For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
-- Janet Frame		 
If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
-- Anatole France		 
The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
-- Anatole France		 
The world wishes to be deceived.
-- Sebastian Franck		 
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
-- Anne Frank		 
To vest a few fallible men – prosecutors, judges, jurors – with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J. S. Mill has called the “Moral Police,” it is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products.
-- Jerome D. Frank		 
To vest a few fallible men -- prosecutors, judges, jurors -- with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J.S. Mill called the "moral police" is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products... If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do otherwise to a work of a genius. Originality, not too plentiful, should be cherished, not stifled. An author's imagination may be cramped if he must write with an eye on prosecutors or juries…
-- Jerome D. Frank		 
Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization.
-- Jerome D. Frank		 
Choice has always been a privilege of those who could afford to pay for it.
-- Ellen Frankfort		 
The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
The requirement of “due process” is not a fairweather or timid assurance. It must be respected in periods of calm and in times of trouble; it protects aliens as well as citizens.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
Ours is an accusatorial and not an inquisitorial system – a system in which the state must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization... The history of civilization is in considerable measure the displacement of error which once held sway as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths. Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not on another occasion indulge its own will.
-- Felix Frankfurter		 
The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes
-- Justice Felix Frankfurter		 
Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.
-- Viktor Frankl		 
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to chose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
-- Viktor Frankl		 
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
-- Viktor Frankl		 
The last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
-- Viktor Frankl		 
A statute intended to prevent unwarranted intrusions into a citizen’s privacy cannot be used as a shield for public officials who cannot assert a comparable right of privacy in their public duties. Such action impedes the free flow of information concerning public officials and violates the First Amendment right to gather such information. ... The [Illinois Eavesdropping Statute] includes conduct that is unrelated to the statute’s purpose and is not rationally related to the evil the legislation sought to prohibit. For example, a defendant recording his case in a courtroom has nothing to do with an intrusion into a citizen’s privacy but with distraction. ... The court finds the Illinois Eavesdropping Statute is unconstitutional on its face and as applied to the defendant as the statute is violative of substantive due process.
-- Judge David Frankland		 
In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
The sun of liberty is set; you must light up the candle of industry and economy.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Moderation in all things -- including moderation.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
That is simple. In the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay no one.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
But what madness must it be to run in debt for these superfluities! We are offered, by the terms of this vendue, six months' credit; and that perhaps has induced some of us to attend it, because we cannot spare the ready money, and hope now to be fine without it. But, ah, think what you do when you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty. If you cannot pay at the time, you will be ashamed to see your creditor; you will be in fear when you speak to him, you will make poor pitiful sneaking excuses, and by degrees come to lose you veracity, and sink into base downright lying; for, as Poor Richard says, the second vice is lying, the first is running in debt. And again to the same purpose, lying rides upon debt's back.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
When you run in debt; you give to another power over your liberty.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ...
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
It is a common observation here that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy… These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. There is no country in the world where so many provisions are established for them; so many hospitals to receive them when they are sick or lame, founded and maintained by voluntary charities; so many alms-houses for the aged of both sexes, together with a solemn general law made by the rich to subject their estates to a heavy tax for the support of the poor. Under all these obligations, are our poor modest, humble, and thankful; and do they use their best endeavours to maintain themselves, and lighten our shoulders of this burthen? — On the contrary, I affirm that there is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken, and insolent. The day you passed that act, you took away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependance on somewhat else than a careful accumulation during youth and health, for support in age or sickness. In short, you offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Plough deep while sluggards sleep.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
All the property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district - all studied and appreciated as they merit - are the principal support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
[A]s all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ...
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Wish not so much to live long as to live well.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Repeal that [welfare] law, and you will soon see a change in their manners. ... Six days shalt thou labor, though one of the old commandments long treated as out of date, will again be looked upon as a respectable precept; industry will increase, and with it plenty among the lower people; their circumstances will mend, and more will be done for their happiness by inuring them to provide for themselves, than could be done by dividing all your estates among them.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
There was never a good war, or a bad peace.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Where liberty dwells, there is my country.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth: 'that God governs in the affairs of men.' And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters, had it not been that England took away from the colonies their money, which created great unemployment and dissatisfaction. Within a year, the poor houses were filled. The hungry and homeless walked the streets everywhere. The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the International Bankers was probably the Prime reason for the Revolutionary War.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ...
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. ... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed...
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ...
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
It is very imprudent to deprive America of any of her privileges. If her commerce and friendship are of any importance to you, they are to be had on no other terms than leaving her in the full enjoyment of her rights.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Man will ultimately be governed by God or by tyrants.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it, whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law and shall chearfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes; and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Public; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence [printers] cheerfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
The States acceded to the Union.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
No man's life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session.
-- Benjamin Franklin (False)		 
Trusting too much to others' care is the ruin of many; for, as the almanac says, in the affairs of this world men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it; but a man's own care is profitable; for, saith Poor Dick, learning is to the studious, and riches to the careful, as well as power to the bold, and Heaven to the virtuous.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
I pronounce it as certain that there was never yet a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Little strokes fell great oaks.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Outside Independence Hall when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
History will also give Occasion to expatiate on the Advantage of Civil Orders and Constitutions, how Men and their Properties are protected by joining in Societies and establishing Government; their Industry encouraged and rewarded, Arts invented, and Life made more comfortable: The Advantages of Liberty, Mischiefs of Licentiousness, Benefits arising from good Laws and a due Execution of Justice, &c. Thus may the first Principles of sound Politicks be fix'd in the Minds of Youth.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Finally, there seem to be but three Ways for a Nation to acquire Wealth. The first is by War as the Romans did in plundering their conquered Neighbours. This is Robbery. The second by Commerce which is generally Cheating. The third by Agriculture the only honest Way; wherein Man receives a real Increase of the Seed thrown into the Ground, in a kind of continual Miracle wrought by the Hand of God in his favour, as a Reward for his innocent Life, and virtuous Industry.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Your creditor has authority at his pleasure to deprive you of your liberty, by confining you in gaol for life, or to sell you for a servant, if you should not be able to pay him! When you have got your bargain, you may, perhaps, think little of payment; but creditors, Poor Richard tells us, have better memories than debtors, and in another place says, creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times. The day comes round before you are aware, and the demand is made before you are prepared to satisfy it. Or if you bear your debt in mind, the term which at first seemed so long, will, as it lessens, appear extreamly short. Time will seem to have added wings to his heels as well as shoulders.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Governor Thomas was so pleas'd with the Construction of this Stove, as describ'd in it, that he offer'd to give me a Patent for the sole Vending of them for a Term of Years; but I declin'd it from a Principle which has ever weigh'd with me on such Occasions, viz. That as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of Others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.
-- Benjamin Franklin		 
Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West coast.
-- Viktor Frankyl		 
Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves.
-- Norm Franz		 
I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right.
-- Frederick the Great		 
The truth is always the strongest argument.
-- Frederick the Great		 
The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices.
-- Frederick the Great		 
Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.
-- Arthur Freed		 
If you ask Americans whether they want an FBI wire tax in their phone bill, they'll say, “No.” If I ask them whether they want a feature on their telephone which allows me to find their child, if they're taken, they'll say, “Yes.” I think it's a question of perception.
-- Louis Freeh		 
Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light?
-- Maurice Freehill		 
Isn't it wonderful to live in a country where anyone can grow up to sleep with the President?
-- Kevin Freels		 
The freemen of America will remember, that it is very easy to change a free government into an arbitrary, despotic, or military one: but it is very difficult, almost impossible to reverse the matter -- very difficult to regain freedom once lost.
-- Freeman’s Journal		 
Constitutions are made of paper; Bayonets are made of steel.
-- French Aphorism		 
There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience.
-- French Proverb		 
I see that you, too, put up monuments to your great dead.
-- Frenchman		 
It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.
-- Sigmund Freud		 
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
-- Sigmund Freud		 
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
-- Sigmund Freud		 
A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.
-- Sigmund Freud		 
To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong.
-- Betty Friedan		 
The right of juries to decide questions of law was widely accepted in the colonies, especially in criminal cases. Prior to 1850, the judge and jury were viewed as partners in many jurisdictions. The jury could decide questions of both law and fact, and the judge helped guide the decision-making process by comments on the witnesses and the evidence. Legal theory and political philosophy emphasized the importance of the Jury in divining natural law, which was thought to be a better source for decision than the “authority of black letter maxim.” Since natural law was accessible to lay people, it was held to be the duty of each juror to determine for himself whether a particular rule of law embodied the principles of the higher natural law. Indeed, it was argued that the United States Constitution embodied a codification of natural rights so that “the reliance by the jury on a higher law was usually viewed as a constitutional judgment.”
-- Kane & Miller Friedenthal		 
The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.
-- David D. Friedman		 
Suppose one little old lady in ten carries a gun. Suppose that one in ten of those, if attacked by a mugger, succeeds in killing the mugger instead of being killed by him -- or shooting herself in the foot. On average, the mugger is much more likely to win the encounter than the little old lady. But -- also on average -- every hundred muggings produces one dead mugger. At those odds, mugging is an unprofitable business -- not many little old ladies carry enough money to justify one chance in a hundred of being killed getting it. The number of muggers declines drastically, not because they have all been killed but because they have, rationally, sought safer professions.
-- David D. Friedman		 
Property is a central economic institution of any society, and private property is the central institution of a free society.
-- David D. Friedman		 
If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Phil Donohue: When you see around the globe the maldistribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries, when you see so few haves and so many have-nots, when you see the greed and the concentration of power, did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism? And whether greed is a good idea to run on? Milton Friedman: Well first of all tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. It's only the other fella that's greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The greatest achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty that you are talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it's exactly in the kind of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system. Phil Donohue: Seems to reward not virtue as much as the ability to manipulate the system. Milton Friedman: And what does reward virtue? You think the Communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? Do you think... American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of political clout? Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? You know I think you are taking a lot of things for granted. And just tell me where in the world you find these angels that are going to organize society for us? Well, I don't even trust you to do that.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
-- Milton Friedman		 
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.
-- Milton Friedman		 
[U]nemployment is ... a side effect of the cure for inflation.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.
-- Milton Friedman		 
I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there’s something wrong, pass a law and do something about it.
-- Milton Friedman		 
A society that puts equality...ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.
-- Milton Friedman		 
We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the 19th century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good. The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it's in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they'll do you harm, why isn't it all right to say you must not eat too much because you'll do harm? Why isn't it all right to say you must not try to go in for skydiving because you're likely to die? Why isn't it all right to say, "Oh, skiing, that's no good, that's a very dangerous sport, you'll hurt yourself"? Where do you draw the line?
-- Milton Friedman		 
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.
-- Milton Friedman		 
To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.
-- Milton Friedman		 
I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself ... Economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. It forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy. ... Roosevelt's policies were very destructive. Roosevelt's policies made the depression longer and worse than it otherwise would have been.
-- Milton Friedman		 
It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users. Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The most unresolved problem of the day is precisely the problem that concerned the founders of this nation: how to limit the scope and power of government. Tyranny, restrictions on human freedom, come primarily from governmental restrictions that we ourselves have set up.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and also the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?
-- Milton Friedman		 
[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.
-- Milton Friedman		 
One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
-- Milton Friedman		 
[Trade licensing] almost inevitably becomes a tool in the hands of a special producer group to maintain a monopoly position at the expense of the rest of the public. There is no way to avoid this result.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interest.
-- Milton Friedman		 
If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.
-- Milton Friedman		 
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
-- Milton Friedman		 
[Drug use] does harm a great many other people, but primarily because it's prohibited. There are an enormous number of innocent victims now. You've got the people whose purses are stolen, who are bashed over the head by people trying to get enough money for their next fix. You've got the people killed in the random drug wars. You've got the corruption of the legal establishment. You've got the innocent victims who are taxpayers who have to pay for more and more prisons, and more and more prisoners, and more and more police. You've got the rest of us who don't get decent law enforcement because all the law enforcement officials are busy trying to do the impossible. And, last, but not least, you've got the people of Colombia and Peru and so on. What business do we have destroying and leading to the killing of thousands of people in Colombia because we cannot enforce our own laws? If we could enforce our laws against drugs, there would be no market for these drugs.
-- Milton Friedman		 
If, for example, existing government intervention is minor, we shall attach a smaller weight to the negative effect of additional government intervention. This is an important reason why many earlier liberals, like Henry Simons, writing at a time when government was small by today’s standards, were willing to have government undertake activities that today’s liberals would not accept now that government has become so overgrown.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.
-- Milton Friedman		 
I think that prohibition of drugs is the most immoral program that the United States has ever engaged in. It's destroyed civil rights at home and it is responsible for thousands of deaths abroad.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights…This implies a belief in the equality of man in one sense; in their inequality in another.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Inflation is taxation without representation.
-- Milton Friedman		 
With respect to teachers' salaries .... Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.
-- Milton Friedman		 
I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that... the severity of each of the contractions - 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 - is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Government power must be dispersed. If government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in Washington. If I do not like what my local community does, be it in sewage disposal, or zoning, or schools, I can move to another local community, and though few may take this step, the mere possibility acts as a check. If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives in this world of jealous nations.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Every friend of freedom... must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The power to determine the quantity of money... is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power... Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes - excusable or not - can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic - this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Central bankers always try to avoid their last big mistake. So every time there's the threat of a contraction in the economy, they'll over stimulate the economy, by printing too much money. The result will be a rising roller coaster of inflation, with each high and low being higher than the preceding one.
-- Milton Friedman		 
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
-- Milton Friedman		 
Spending by government currently amounts to about 45 percent of national income. By that test, government owns 45 percent of the means of production that produce the national income. The U.S. is now 45 percent socialist.
-- Milton Friedman		 
The history of totalitarian regimes is reflected in the evolution and perfection of the instruments of terror and more especially the police.
-- Carl J. Friedrich		 
O, only a free soul will never grow old! [Ger., O, nur eine freie Seele wird nicht alt.]
-- Jean Paul Friedrich Richter		 
No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand [television].
-- Fred W. Friendly		 
Some want prayer in school, some want condoms. Printing prayers on condoms satisfies nobody.
-- Marshall Fritz		 
The Left/Right scale is a misleading way of comparing political systems. It doesn't measure anything.
-- Marshall Fritz		 
In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise. The core is religious intolerance. The sides simply change between the Atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, etc., depending whether you are talking about the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, America, etc. A common second reason is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on.
-- Marshall Fritz		 
The Left/Right scale is a misleading way of comparing political systems. It doesn't measure anything.
-- Marshall Fritz		 
Charter schools are just public schools on a slightly longer leash. A dog on a long leash is still a dog on a leash.
-- Marshall Fritz		 
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.
-- Erich Fromm		 
If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it.
-- Erich Fromm		 
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.
-- Erich Fromm		 
The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an “individual,” existing apart from his group.
-- Erich Fromm		 
Vote Labor, and you build castles in the air. Vote Conservative, and you can live in them.
-- David Frost		 
Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
-- Robert Frost		 
Freedom lies in being bold.
-- Robert Frost		 


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The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
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Quick Quips and Quotes; 532 Things I Wish I Had Said
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The ultimate anthology of anecdotes, now revised with over 700 new entries.


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