Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 

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He alone deserves liberty and life who daily must win them anew.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 
Nothing is as terrible to see as ignorance in action.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 
What is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 
During my training I was trained in Psycho-politics. This was the art of capturing the minds of a nation through brainwashing and fake mental health.
-- Kenneth Goff
 
This manual of the Communist Party should be in the hands of every loyal American, that they may be alerted to the fact that it is not always by armies and guns that a nation is conquered.
-- Kenneth Goff
 
It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation's foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action.
-- Justice Arthur Goldberg
 
Extremism in pursuit of moderation is not necessarily a virtue.
-- Jonah Goldberg
 
Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained.  True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests.  In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.
-- Emma Goldman
 
The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet how can anyone speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed?... With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
-- Emma Goldman
 
If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.
-- Emma Goldman
 
The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals.
-- Emma Goldman
 
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime.  Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime.  It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
-- Emma Goldman
 
There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another… All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim.
-- Emma Goldman
 
To subject an artist’s work to a litmus test of political probity – and to punish institutions that will not carry out the mandate of the state – is to traffic in the thought control that gave us Stalinism and Nazism…
-- Richard Goldstein
 
Political repression consists of government action which grossly discriminates against persons or organizations viewed as presenting a fundamental challenge to existing power relationships or key governmental policies, because of their perceived political beliefs.
-- Robert Justin Goldstein
 
America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole.
-- Bobcat Goldthwait
 
Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.
-- Barry Goldwater (Questionable)
 
The Trilateralist Commission is international...(and)...is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateralist Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power - political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical.
-- Barry Goldwater
 
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution ... or have failed their purpose ... or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should be attacked for neglecting my constituents' 'interests,' I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty, and in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
-- Barry Goldwater
 
How did it happen? How did our national government grow from a servant with sharply limited powers into a master with virtually unlimited power? In part, we were swindled. There are occasions when we have elevated men and political parties to power that promised to restore limited government and then proceeded, after their election, to expand the activities of government. But let us be honest with ourselves. Broken promises are not the major causes of our trouble. Kept promises are. All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of 'security.' We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapture of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system. We have gone the way of many a democratic society that has lost its freedom by persuading itself that if 'the people' rule, all is well.
-- Barry Goldwater
 
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
-- Barry Goldwater
 
And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse -- the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist.
-- Barry Goldwater
 
The time has come to recognize the United Nations for the anti-American, anti-freedom organization that it has become. The time has come for us to cut off all financial help, withdraw as a member, and ask the United Nations to find headquarters location outside the United States that is more in keeping with the philosophy of the majority of voting members, someplace like Moscow or Peking.
-- Barry Goldwater
 
I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.
-- Barry Goldwater
 
Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth, and let me remind you they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyranny.
-- Barry Goldwater
 
Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside of the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.
-- Barry Goldwater
 
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
-- Barry Goldwater
 
There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.' Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?
-- Barry Goldwater
 
The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say things which displease, the right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong.
-- Samuel Gompers
 
Jury Nullification encourages participation in the judicial process, which in turn furthers the legitimization of the legal system. Jury Nullification also serves to inject community values and standards into the administration of our laws. Ordinary citizens are given the chance to infuse community values into the judicial process in the interests of fairness and justice and at the same time provide a signal to lawmakers that they have drifted too far from the Democratic will... History is replete with examples that Jury Nullification serves as a corrective “veto” power of the people over both legislative and judicial rigidity and tyranny.
-- Justice William C. Goodle
 
When there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.
-- Paul Goodman
 
Few great men could pass Personnel.
-- Paul Goodman
 
Corruption is no stranger to Washington; it is a famous resident.
-- Walter Goodman
 
Freedom of conscience is a natural right, both antecedent and superior to all human laws and institutions whatever; a right which laws never gave and a right which laws can never take away.
-- John Goodwin
 
Further global progress is now possible only through a quest for universal consensus in the movement towards a new world order.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev
 
I am a Communist, a convinced Communist! For some that may be a fantasy. But to me it is my main goal.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev
 
In our discussions here at the forum there was no trace of the futile debate about what is better, capitalism or socialism...We should seek a synthesis of ideas and values that have proven their viability...
-- Mikhail Gorbachev
 
In October 1917, we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, a world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev
 
Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev
 
Those who hope that we shall move away from the socialist path will be greatly disappointed. Every part of our program of perestroika … is fully based on the principle of more socialism and more democracy. ... I would like to be clearly understood ... we, the Soviet people, are for socialism. ... We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy. ... More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life. … We will proceed toward better socialism rather than away from it. We are saying this honestly, without trying to fool our own people or the world. Any hopes that we will begin to build a different, non-socialist society and go over to the other camp are unrealistic and futile. Those in the West who expect us to give up socialism will be disappointed. ... It’s my conviction that the human race has entered a stage where we are all dependent on each other. No other country or nation should be regarded in total separation from another, let alone pitted against another. That’s what our communist vocabulary calls internationalism and it means promoting universal human values.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev
 
Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.
-- Nadine Gordimer
 
You can't make socialists out of individualists.  Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.
-- Rosalie M. Gordon
 
The Final Act of the Uruguay Round, marking the conclusion of the most ambitious trade negotiation of our century, will give birth - in Morocco - to the World Trade Organization, the third pillar of the New World Order, along with the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.
-- Government of Morocco
 
The Final Act of the Uruguay Round, marking the conclusion of the most ambitious trade negotiation of our century, will give birth - in Morocco - to the World Trade Organization, the third pillar of the New World Order, along with the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.
-- Government of Morocco
 
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
-- Goya
 
Free lunch strategies have a habit of self-destructing. The Swiss economist Eugene Boehler had the context of such false and unsustainable images in mind when he noted that the 'modern economy is as much a dream factory as Hollywood.' It is based only a small part on real needs, and for the greatest part on fantasy and myth, he claimed. The stock exchange, far from ruling economic life, is at the mercy of tides of collective make-believe. Depressions come about when there is a loss of economic myth - (Eugene Boehler 'Der Mythus in der Wirtschaft,' Industrielle Organization, XXXI, 1962.)
-- J. Orlin Grabbe
 
INDIVIDUALISM: The term 'individualism' has a great variety of meanings in social and political philosophy. There are at least three types that can be distinguished: (1) ontological individualism, (2) methodological individualism, and (3) moral or political individualism. Ontological individualism is the doctrine that social reality consists, ultimately, only of persons who choose and act. Collectives, such as a social class, state, or a group, cannot act so they are not considered to have a reality independent of the actions of persons. Methodological individualists hold that the only genuinely scientific propositions in social science are those that can be reduced to the actions, dispositions, and decisions of individuals. Political or moral individualism is the theory that individuals should be left, as far as possible, to determine their own futures in economic and moral matters. Key thinkers include Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, John Locke, and Herbert Spencer.
-- Stephen Grabill
 
COLLECTIVISM: Collectivism is defined as the theory and practice that makes some sort of group rather than the individual the fundamental unit of political, social, and economic concern. In theory, collectivists insist that the claims of groups, associations, or the state must normally supersede the claims of individuals.
-- Stephen Grabill
 
100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal Debt ... all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services taxpayers expect from government.
-- Grace Commission
 
The sole advantage of power is that you can do more good.
-- Baltasar Gracian
 
I used to be indecisive; now I'm not sure.
-- Graffiti
 
Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
-- Graffiti
 
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
-- Graffiti
 
You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.
-- Benjamin Graham
 
I've read the last page of the Bible. It's all going to turn out all right.
-- Billy Graham
 
We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.
-- Katharine Graham
 
Truth and news are not the same thing.
-- Katharine Graham
 
Government is not the generator of economic growth; working people are.
-- Sen. Phil Gramm
 
Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.
-- Antonio Gramsci
 
Voir dire was supposed to guarantee the defendant a fair and neutral jury, but instead they’re using it to “clean up” the juries (and get rid of) those opposed to the court’s policies. They don’t want an independent jury. They believe it’s their jury. ... [T]he way they’re using voir dire now, starts jurors thinking, “Is there anything that would make me hesitate to convict?”
-- Paul Grant
 
Can we assume that a thing is right if it is legal? But slavery was once legal; Nazism was legal. Well, can we assume a thing is right if it is endorsed by majority rule? But a lynch mob is majority rule. Is a thing sure to be right, then, if it comes about through the democratic process? But fascist dictator Juan Perón of Argentina was democratically elected by majority rule on two occasions. . . . Well, how about the Constitution? But again we run into difficulties, for the Constitution can be amended to say anything the society wishes it to say. Suppose, for example, the Constitution were amended to permit the lynching of blacks—would this practice become ethically correct merely because the Constitution permitted it? The moral basis of capitalism is the right of each individual to live his own life, for his own sake.
-- R.W. Grant
 
I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.
-- Ulysses S. Grant
 
The right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable.
-- Ulysses S. Grant
 
If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.
-- Ulysses S. Grant
 
The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on.
-- Ulysses S. Grant
 
I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
-- Ulysses S. Grant
 
Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately, you occasionally find men who disgrace labor.
-- Ulysses S. Grant
 
Google, Amazon (AWS), Apple and other elitist “alphabets” are controlled by global entities working in collusion through major stakeholders and executives for the benefit of foreign and domestic globalist agendas and not for the protection of their clients or user base. Their neo-Nazi ideology proliferates one world governance through technology. It’s a kind of tech socialism mixed with big brother in the cloud along with other mentally unstable ideas. Thus, independence from these ideologies, individuals and companies are required to maintain security and loyalty to our clients.
-- Rich Granville
 
The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak.
-- Wavy Gravy
 
Ponder the capriciousness of human nature, which allows momentary appetites and fleeting attitudes to set the courses for entire lives and future responsibilities.
-- Ann Gray
 
American strategic [nuclear] forces do not exist solely for the purpose of deterring a Soviet nuclear threat or attack against the U.S. itself. Instead, they are intended to support U.S. foreign policy.
-- Colin Gray
 
While boasting of our noble deeds we're careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.
-- Horace Greeley
 
I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.
-- Horace Greeley
 
We have stricken the shackles from 4,000,000 human beings and brought all labourers to a common level, but not so much by the elevation of former slaves as by reducing the whole working population, white and black, to a condition of serfdom. While boasting of our noble deeds, we are careful to conceal the ugly fact that by our iniquitous money system we have manipulated a system of oppression which, though more refined, is no less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.
-- Horace Greeley
 
Although this nation unquestionably must take strong action under the leadership of the commander in chief to protect itself against enormous and unprecedented threats, that necessity cannot negate the existence of the most basic fundamental rights for which the people of this country have fought and died for well over two hundred years... In sum, there can be no question that the Fifth Amendment right asserted by the Guantanamo detainees in this litigation -- the right not to be deprived of liberty without due process of law -- is one of the most fundamental rights recognized by the U.S. Constitution.
-- Judge Joyce Hens Green
 
For the average American family, filling out a tax form has become like attacking a puzzle to which, often enough, there is no right answer. But we're all supposed to swear, on penalty of perjury, that we've done our best to find it.
-- Paul Greenberg
 
The right just doesn't exist. Clearly, the states no longer need protection from the federal government disarming their "well-regulated" militia. The Second Amendment no longer speaks to us. The Second Amendment has no modern day application. The Second Amendment is dead.
-- Judge Ron Greenburg
 
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
-- Graham Greene
 
Regulation -- which is based on force and fear -- undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory.
-- Alan Greenspan
 
As long as we issue fiat currency, I see no alternative to a legal tender law.
-- Alan Greenspan
 
Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth.
-- Alan Greenspan
 
An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense -- perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire -- that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.
-- Alan Greenspan
 
Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world.
-- Alan Greenspan
 
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights.
-- Alan Greenspan
 
We can guarantee cash benefits as far out and at whatever size you like, but we cannot guarantee their purchasing power.
-- Alan Greenspan
 
In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. ... This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.
-- Alan Greenspan
 
No matter how one approaches the figures, one is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much less when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without restriction.... Half a century of strict controls on pistols has ended, perversely, with a far greater use of this class of weapon in crime than ever before.
-- Colin Greenwood
 
Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.
-- Germaine Greer
 
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
-- Germaine Greer
 
As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
-- Richard Grenier
 
You miss 100% of the shots you never take.
-- Wayne Gretzky
 
Whatever natural right men may have to freedom and independency, it is manifest that some men have a natural ascendency over others.
-- Sir Fulke Greville
 
If it weren't for lawyers, we wouldn't need them.
-- A. K. Griffin
 
No one in America fully understands the constantly changing Internal Revenue Code. Agents of the IRS do not, judges do not, congressmen do not, and most assuredly taxpayers do not.
-- G. Edward Griffin
 
Inflation has now been institutionalized at a fairly constant 5% per year. This has been determined to be the optimum level for generating the most revenue without causing public alarm. A 5% devaluation applies, not only to the money earned this year, but to all that is left over from previous years. At the end of the first year, a dollar is worth 95 cents. At the end of the second year, the 95 cents is reduced again by 5%, leaving its worth at 90 cents, and so on. By the time a person has worked 20 years, the government will have confiscated 64% of every dollar he saved over those years. By the time he has worked 45 years, the hidden tax will be 90%. The government will take virtually everything a person saves over a lifetime.
-- G. Edward Griffin
 
To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism.
-- G. Edward Griffin
 
The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians.
-- Angelica Grimke
 
Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom.
-- A. Whitney Griswold
 
Certain things we cannot accomplish… by any process of government. We cannot legislate intelligence. We cannot legislate morality. No, and we cannot legislate loyalty, for loyalty is a kind of morality.
-- A. Whitney Griswold
 
The privilege against self-incrimination is one of the great landmarks in man's struggle to make himself civilized... The Fifth is a lone sure rock in time of storm ... a symbol of the ultimate moral sense of the community, upholding the best in us.
-- Erwin N. Griswold
 
The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights.
-- Erwin N. Griswold
 
A spider web of 'patriots for profit', operating from the highest positions of special trust and confidence, have successfully circumvented our constitutional system in pursuit of a New World Order.
-- Lt. Col. James Bo Gritz (Ret)
 
Anything anybody can say about America is true.
-- Emmett Grogan
 
The freedom of thought and speech arising from and privileged by our constitution gives force and poignancy to the expressions of our common people.
-- Francis Grose
 
The wages of the average American worker, after inflation and taxes, have decreased 17% since 1973, the only Western industrial nation to so suffer.
-- Martin Gross
 
[A]ny provider that commands 90 percent of the market—whether we’re talking about software, phone service, or heating oil—is, by definition, a monopoly. Our government employs thousands of bureaucrats to track down and break up monopolies on the grounds that monopolies stifle competition and thereby produce bad products at high prices. Doesn’t it strike anyone as strange that the same government protects its own monopoly in education? And stranger still, that nearly everyone accepts this state of affairs as normal—as something that has always been and must always be? ... [C]ompetition forces public schools into making long-overdue repairs. And it offers poor parents the choices they desperately desire.
-- Jennifer A. Grossman
 
A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.
-- Texas Guinan
 
The tolerance of the skeptic… accepts the most diverse and indeed the most contradictory opinions, and keeps all his suspicions for the “dogmatist.”
-- Jean Guitton
 
The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.
-- Francois Pierre Guizot
 
Television was our chief tool in selling our policy.
-- Richard Haass
 
You never hear about constitutional rights, free speech, and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, “That man is a Red, that man is a communist.” You never hear a real American talk like that.
-- Frank Hague
 
That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude.
-- Alexander Haig
 
There are contingency plans in the NATO doctrine to fire a nuclear weapon for demonstrative purposes, to demonstrate to the other side that they are exceeding the limits of toleration in the conventional area.
-- Alexander Haig
 
The loss of candor is grievous, and in my opinion it may yet prove to be mortal, because if we cannot discuss our problems in plain speech that describes reality, it is unlikely that we will be able to solve them.
-- Alexander Haig
 
In the history of censorship, the oldest and most frequently recurring controls have been those designed to prevent unorthodox and unpopular expressions of political or religions opinions.
-- Ann Lyon Haight
 
Political liberty is nothing else but the diffusion of power.
-- Lord Hailsham
 
[T]he courts in the United States are continually called upon to deal with questions that are purely political and governmental; to enter, partially at least, into the realm of legislation; and to discuss questions of political, economic, and social theory.
-- Charles Haines
 
With every civil right there has to be a corresponding civil obligation.
-- Edison Haines
 
Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers.
-- Bernhard Haisch
 
In 1928, Germany enacted its Gesetz uber Schusswaffen und Munition (Law on Firearms and Ammunition), which required firearms and ammunition acquisition permits and record keeping for all transactions. Through this legislation, the police acquired knowledge of all firearm owners, which was used to the Nazis' advantage when they took power in 1933. The Nazi Waffengesetz (Weapons Law) of 1938, signed by Adolph Hitler, built upon the previous registration systems and strictly regulated handguns. ... On the first day the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia, they put up posters in every town ordering the inhabitants to surrender all firearms, including hunting guns. The penalty for disobedience was death. The Nazis were able to use local and central registration records of firearms owners and hunters to execute the decree. Lists of potential dissidents and other suspects were already prepared, and those persons disappeared immediately. The Nazi commander of Belgium and Netherlands proclaimed that "[t]he surrender of weapons and other implements of war has been ordered by special proclamation.... Hunting guns are [also] to be surrendered ...." The Nazi head of Norway decreed that "[a]ll arms and munitions must be handed over" because only licensed officials and persons with police permits retained the right to possess arms.
-- Stephen P. Halbrook
 
Such questions have never been discussed in scholarly publications because the Nazi laws, policies, and practices have never been adequately documented. The record establishes that a well-meaning liberal republic would enact a gun control act that would later be highly useful to a dictatorship.
-- Stephen P. Halbrook
 
In recent years it has been suggested that the Second Amendment protects the "collective" right of states to maintain militias, while it does not protect the right of "the people" to keep and bear arms. If anyone entertained this notion in the period during which the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were debated and ratified, it remains one of the most closely guarded secrets of the eighteenth century, for no known writing surviving from the period between 1787 and 1791 states such a thesis.
-- Steven P. Halbrook
 
We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.
-- H. R. Haldeman
 
I am only one. But still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do.
-- Edward Everett Hale
 
I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
-- Nathan Hale
 
Before the advent of Hitler or Stalin, who took their power from the German and the Russian people, measures were thrust upon the free legislatures of those countries to deprive the people of the possession and use of firearms, so that they could not resist the encroachments of such diabolical and vitriolic state police organizations as the Gestapo, the Ogpu, and the Cheka. Just as sure as I am standing here today, you are going to see this measure followed by legislation, sponsored by the proponents of such encroachment upon the rights of the people, which will eventually deprive the people of their constitutional liberty which provides for the possession of firearms for the protection of their homes. I submit to you that it is a serious departure from constitutional government when we consider legislation of this type. I predict that within 6 months of this time there will be presented to this House a measure which will go a long way toward taking away forever the individual rights and liberties of citizens of this Nation by depriving the individual of the private ownership of firearms and the right to use weapons in the protection of his home, and thereby his country.
-- Edwin Arthur Hall
 
Socialism in America will come through the ballot box.
-- Gus Hall
 
When the Mason learns that the key to the warrior on the block is the proper application of the dynamo of living power, he has learned the mystery of his Craft. The seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands, and before he may step onward and upward, he must prove his ability to properly apply energy. He must follow in the footsteps of his forefather, Tubal-Cain, who with the mighty strength of the war god hammered his sword into a plowshare.
-- Manley P. Hall
 
Secret societies have existed among all peoples, savage and civilized, since the beginning of recorded history...It is beyond question that the secret societies of all ages have exercised a considerable degree of political influence...
-- Manley P. Hall
 
Secret Societies have existed among all peoples, savage and civilized, since the beginning of recorded history... It is beyond question that the secret societies of all ages have exercised a considerable degree of political influence.
-- Manly P. Hall
 
To render the magistrate a judge of truth, and engage his authority in the suppression of opinions, shews an inattention to the nature and designs of political liberty.
-- Robert Hall
 
The revolt against freedom, which can be traced back so far, is associated with a revolt against reason that [gives] sentiment primacy to evaluate actions and experiences according to the subjective emotions with which they are associated.
-- Louis J. Halle
 
If what is best in mankind, and what its progress depends on, manifests itself primarily in the individual and only secondarily in the mass, then our objectives should be to maintain such freedom as allows the individual to think and speak for himself.
-- Louis J. Halle
 
In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this, would be to affirm, that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers, may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
But if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
[W]ar is a question, under our constitution, not of Executive, but of Legislative cognizance. It belongs to Congress to say whether the Nation shall of choice dismiss the olive branch and unfurl the banners of War.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the well-born; the other the mass of the people ... turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the Government ... Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Responsibility, in order to be reasonable, must be limited to objects within the power of the responsible party, and in order to be effectual, must relate to operations of that power, of which a ready and proper judgment can be formed by the constituents.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Here sir, the people govern.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
We may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms and false reasonings is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
If it be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
[Imeachable conduct is] misconduct by public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Allow a government to decline paying its debts and you overthrow all public morality.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
[A] limited Constitution ... can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing ... To deny this would be to affirm … that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
If the Constitution is adopted the Union will be in fact and in theory an association of States of a Confederacy.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is in fact, and must be, regarded by the judges as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought of course to be preferred; or in other words, the constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of the people to the intention of their agents.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Wise politicians will be cautious about fettering the government with restrictions that cannot be observed, because they know that every break of the fundamental laws, though dictated by necessity, impairs that sacred reverence which ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense...
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
To judge from the history of mankind, we shall be compelled to conclude, that the fiery and destructive passions of war, reign in the human breast, with much more powerful sway, than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace; and, that to model our political systems upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Foreign influence is truly the Grecian horse to a republic. We cannot be too careful to exclude its influence.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
But as the plan of the [Constitutional] convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, EXCLUSIVELY delegated to the United States.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the King of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable: There is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable, no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
No legislative act contrary to the Constitution can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy (agent) is greater than his principal; that the servant is above the master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people; that men, acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid. It is not to be supposed that the Constitution could intend to enable the representatives of the people to substitute their will to that of their constituents. A Constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by judges as fundamental law. If there should happen to be a irreconcilable variance between the two, the Constitution is to be preferred to the statute.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The fundamental source of all your errors, sophisms, and false reasonings, is a total ignorance of the natural rights of mankind. Were you once to become acquainted with these, you could never entertain a thought, that all men are not, by nature, entitled to a parity of privileges. You would be convinced, that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator, to the whole human race; and that civil liberty is founded in that; and cannot be wrested from any people, without the most manifest violation of justice. Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but it is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
It is an unquestionable truth, that the body of the people in every country desire sincerely its prosperity. But it is equally unquestionable that they do not possess the discernment and stability necessary for systematic government. To deny that they are frequently led into the grossest of errors, by misinformation and passion, would be a flattery which their own good sense must despise.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
[I]t is a truth which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are always most in danger, when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, be appealed to for an answer to these inquiries.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government...
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
It is the advertiser who provides the paper for the subscriber. It is not to be disputed, that the publisher of a newspaper in this country, without a very exhaustive advertising support, would receive less reward for his labor than the humblest mechanic.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
It is far more rational to suppose that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
But as the plan of the convention aims only at a partial union or consolidation, the State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, EXCLUSIVELY delegated to the United States.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Allow a government to decline paying its debts and you overthrow all public morality — you unhinge all the principles that preserve the limits of free constitutions. Nothing can more affect national prosperity than a constant and systematic attention to extinguish the present debt and to avoid as much as possible the incurring of any new debt.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
And it proves, in the last place, that liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the other departments.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
A fondness for power is implanted, in most men, and it is natural to abuse it, when acquired.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
There is not a syllable in the plan under consideration which directly empowers the national courts to construe the laws according to the spirit of the Constitution.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The attributes of sovereignty are now enjoyed by every state in the Union.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free, rather than a slave.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The State governments possess inherent advantages, which will ever give them an influence and ascendancy over the National Government, and will for ever preclude the possibility of federal encroachments. That their liberties, indeed, can be subverted by the federal head, is repugnant to every rule of political calculation.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Government implies the power of making laws. It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The instrument by which it [government] must act are either the AUTHORITY of the laws or FORCE. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government there is an end to liberty!
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The prosecution [of impeachments], will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust, and they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Every individual of the community at large has an equal right to the protection of government.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the land and naval forces, as first general and admiral ... while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies -- all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
In the general course of human nature, A power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others. ... The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
In the general course of human nature, A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
In the recommendation to admit indiscriminately foreign emigrants of every description to the privileges of American citizens on their first entrance into our country, there is an attempt to break down every pale which has been erected for the preservation of a national spirit and a national character; and to let in the most powerful means of perverting and corrupting both the one and the other.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
[T]here is a wide difference between closing the door altogether and throwing it entirely open; between a postponement of fourteen years and an immediate admission to all the rights of citizenship. Some reasonable term ought to be allowed to enable aliens to get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments; to learn the principles and imbibe the spirit of our government; and to admit of at least a probability of their feeling a real interest in our affairs.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice, and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of its political cares.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The greatest danger is that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to society itself.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
A nation, which can prefer appeasement over danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.
-- Alexander Hamilton
 
Jurors should acquit, even against the judge’s instruction ... if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction that the charge of the court is wrong.
-- Andrew Hamilton
 
I know, may it please your honour, the jury may do so; but I do likewise know they may do otherwise. I know they have the right, beyond all dispute, to determine both the law and the fact; and where they do not doubt the law, they ought to do so. This of leaving it to the judgment of the Court whether the words are libelous or not in effect renders juries useless (to say no worse) in many cases.
-- Andrew Hamilton
 
I have always believed that government had a limited capacity to do good and a virtually infinite capacity to do harm...
-- Neil Hamilton
 
Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician. Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there. Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16. A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death. A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you. Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water. And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.
-- Suheir Hammad
 
It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.
-- Dag Hammarskjold
 
Americans will spend more this year per capita on taxes than on food ($2,693), clothing ($1,404) and shelter ($5,833) combined. The single highest spending item is federal taxes, at $7,026 ... Arizonans’ per-capita bite is $9,041, a combination of federal and state taxes.
-- Sara Hammond
 
There, I guess King George will be able to read that.
-- John Hancock
 
In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
I believe that the community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence, where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won.
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands.
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it.
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no court, can even do much to help it.
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women...
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of the law. Detestation of existing politics is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution...
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition.
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
Words are chameleons, which reflect the colour of their environment.
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it… What is this liberty that must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not the freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check on their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few -- as we have learned to our sorrow. What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias...
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.
-- Judge Learned Hand
 
The thought that average citizens will somehow be better able to successfully defend themselves more effectively than our nation's trained professionals is absurd.
-- Handgun Control, Inc.
 
There is as far as I know, no example in history, of any state voluntarily ceding power from the centre to its constituent parts.
-- Charles Handy
 
We will either find a way or make one.
-- Hannibal
 
The IRS is an extraordinary example of the end justifying the means. The means of this agency is growth. It is interesting that the revenue officers within the IRS refer to taxpayers as 'inventory'. The IRS embodies the political realities of the selfish human desire to dominate others. Thus the end of this gigantic pretense of officialdom is power, pure and simple. The meek may inherit the earth, but they will never receive a promotion in an agency where efficiency is measured by the number of seizures of taxpayers' property and by the number of citizens and businesses driven into bankruptcy.
-- George Hansen
 
Only the IRS can attach 100% of a tax debtor's wages and/or property.
Only the IRS can invade the privacy of a citizen without court process of any kind.
Only the IRS can seize property without a court order.
Only the IRS can force a citizen to try his case in a special court governed by the IRS.
Only the IRS can compel the production of documents, records, and other materials without a court case being in existence.
Only the IRS can with impunity publish the details of a citizens debt.
Only the IRS can legally, without a court order, subject citizens to electronic surveillance.
Only the IRS can force waiver of statute of limitations and other citizen's rights through the threat of Arbitrary assesment.
Only the IRS uses extralegal coercion. Threats to witnesses to examine their taxes regularly produces whatever evidence the IRS dictates.
Only the IRS is free to violate a written agreement with a citizen.
Only the IRS uses reprisals against citizen and public officials alike.
Only the IRS can take property on the basis of conjecture.
Only the IRS is free to maintain lists of citizen guilty of no crime for the purpose of harassing and monitoring them.
Only the IRS envelops all citizens.
Only the IRS publicly admits that it's purpose is to instill fear in the citizenry as a technique of performing it's function.
-- George V. Hansen
 
One method of overcoming the difficult informational requirements of the allocation models described above is by enacting a requirement that anyone wanting to purchase cigarettes must first purchase a 'cigarette card'. The card, which could be based on the same magnetic strip (or computer chip) technology used for credit cards and ATM cards, would be issued to any legal-aged smoker who wanted to buy cigarettes and would have to be presented by the smoker each time she purchased cigarettes. A reaction of many readers may well be that our proposal gives too much information to government agencies, therefore creating a 'Big Brother' problem. We sympathize with that concern, but we believe the problem is not as significant as it may appear initially. First, it is not clear that the sort of information that the cigarette card system would generate is any different from the sort of information that the American public routinely provides to government and private agencies. In other words, it may be too late to worry about the sort of privacy concern that this proposal raises.
-- Jon D. Hanson and Kyle D. Logue
 
Imagine the traditionalist as living in synopticon—a suspect that is the target of 24/7 viewing, indoctrination, and conditioning by progressive auditors. In other words, a 40-45 percent minority of Americans is relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360- degree ring of prying institutional overseers. There is no escape. There is no respite. There is no quarter given.
-- Victor Davis Hanson
 
The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites.'
-- Larry Hardiman
 
Don't do drugs because if you do drugs you'll go to prison, and drugs are really expensive in prison.
-- John Hardwick
 
There is no prospect that today's younger workers will receive all the Social Security and Medicare benefits currently promised them.
-- Dorcas Hardy
 
Persons with weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits.
-- Thomas Hardy
 
Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.
-- Sir John Harington
 
The constitutional right of free expression... is designed and intended to remove governmental restraints from the arena of public discussion, putting the decision as to what views shall be voiced in the hands of each of us, in the hope that the use of such freedom will ultimately produce a more capable citizenry and more perfect polity and in the belief that no other approach would comport with the premise of individual dignity and choice upon which our political systems rests.
-- John Marshall Harlan II
 
One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric.
-- John Marshall Harlan II
 
Privacy in one’s associations… may in many circumstances be indispensable to freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.
-- John Marshall Harlan II
 
In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
-- John Marshall Harlan
 
I cannot assent to the view, if it be meant that the legislature may impair or abridge the rights of a free press and of free speech whenever it thinks that the public welfare requires that it be done. The public welfare cannot override constitutional privilege.
-- John Marshall Harlan
 
We cannot sanction the view that the Constitution, while solicitous of the cognitive content of individual speech, has little or no regard for that emotive function which, practically speaking, may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.
-- John Marshall Harlan II
 
The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people.
-- Lucille S. Harper
 
The most powerful clique in these (CFR) groups have one objective in common they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace. What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for “the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all powerful one world government.”
-- Harpers magazine
 
Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.
-- Sir John Harrington
 
Some [IRS agents] were vicious -- they’d brag back at the office, 'Boy did I make that guy jump.' Or 'I had that woman crying when I told her I’d put her on the street with her kids.' One agent who bragged about padlocking some guy’s business said the man was so upset he asked, 'How do you expect me to pay now?' The agent said, 'I told him, Go get your wife to peddle [herself].'
-- Art Harris
 
It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man.
-- David Harris
 
[The prison guards are] capable of committing daily atrocities and obscenities, smiling the smile of the angels all the while.
-- Jean Harris
 
Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
-- Sydney J. Harris
 
Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
-- Sydney J. Harris
 
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice -- that is, until we have stopped saying, "It got lost," and say, "I lost it.
-- Sydney J. Harris
 
Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.
-- William T. Harris
 
We Americans have no commission from God to police the world
-- Benjamin Harrison
 
Those who are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize.
-- Elizabeth Harrison
 
The plea of necessity, that eternal argument of all conspirators.
-- William Henry Harrison
 
Understanding of men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon their passions and prejudices.
-- William Henry Harrison
 
The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart
 
...regrettable as it may seem to the idealist, the experience of history provides little warrant for the belief that real progress, and the freedom that makes progress possible, lies in unification. For where unification has been able to establish unity of ideas it has usually ended in uniformity, paralysing the growth of new ideas. And where the unification has merely brought about an artificial or imposed unity, its irksomeness has led through discord to disruption.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart
 
In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart
 
Vitality springs from diversity -- which makes for real progress so long as there is mutual toleration, based on the recognition that worse may come from an attempt to suppress differences than from acceptance of them. For this reason, the kind of peace that makes progress possible is best assured by the mutual checks created by a balance of forces-alike in the sphere of internal politics and of international relations.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart
 
Every culture and every religion of what we call the civilized world carries, in one form or another, a mythos or story about a time in the past or future when humans lived or will live in peace and harmony. Whether it's referred to as Valhalla or Eden, Shambala or 'A Thousand Years of Peace,' the Satya Yuga or Jannat, stories of past or coming times of paradise go hand-in-hand with hierarchical cultures. Such prophecies were clearly in the minds of America's Founders when they first discussed integrating Greek ideas of democracy, Roman notions of a republic, Masonic utopian ideals, and the Iroquois Federation's constitutionally organized egalitarian society, which was known to Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Franklin. The creation of the United States of America brought into the world a dramatic new experiment in how people could live together in a modern state.
-- Thom Hartmann
 
As the death toll mounts -- as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on -- the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.
-- Harvard University Press
 
They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?
-- Paul Harvey
 
One would think by listening to all the propaganda about the United Nations that they are some sort of benevolent, peaceful organization. Never in the history of the United Nations has it stood for anything but killing and violence. They have never kept peace anywhere on this globe. Their sole function is to replace the U.S. military - dissolve all four branches of our armed forces. Their allegiance is only to the United Nations Charter which does not recognize the U.S. Constitution. This body is made up almost exclusively of communists and leaders of the bloodiest regimes on this globe. Their history and operating agenda is apparent to anyone who takes the time to sincerely and with an open mind, research the facts of this organization, separating truth from myth. Bilderberger participants ( another group committed to one-world domination) in 1992 called for 'conditioning the public to accept the idea of a U.N. army that could, by force, impose its will on the internal affairs of any nation.'
-- Paul Harvey
 
It was self-serving politicians who convinced recent generations of Americans that we could all stand in a circle with our hands in each other’s pockets and somehow get rich.
-- Paul Harvey
 
That the CFR has been in control of the foreign policy of the United States for some time should now be beyond question.
-- Richard Harwood
 
A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends.
-- Caryl Parker Haskins
 
Our job [journalism] is to monitor the centres of power.
-- Amira Hass
 
The greatest Glory of a free-born People, Is to transmit that Freedom to their Children.
-- William Havard
 
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can probe mightier than ten military divisions.
-- Vaclav Havel
 
If a single writer in a country is in chains, then there are some links of that chain that binds us all.
-- Vaclav Havel
 
Lying can never save us from another lie.
-- Vaclav Havel
 
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one is true.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
 
Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing.
-- Ralph M. Hawtrey
 
The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.
-- John Hay
 
This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.
-- Robert Earl Hayden
 
What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
[T]hose who are willing to surrender their freedom for security have always demanded that if they give up their full freedom it should also be taken from those not prepared to do so.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently.  Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The successful politician owes his power to the fact that he moves within the accepted framework of thought, that he thinks and talks conventionally. It would be almost a contradiction in terms for a politician to be a leader in the field of ideas. His task in a democracy is to find out what the opinions held by the largest number are, not to give currency to new opinions which may become the majority view in some distant future.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
But after war [WW II] broke out I felt that this widespread misunderstanding of the political systems of our enemies, and soon also our new ally, Russia, constituted a serious danger which had to be met by a more systematic effort. Also, it was already fairly obvious that England herself was likely to experiment after the war with the same kind of policies which I was convinced had contributed so much to destroy liberty elsewhere. ... Opinion moves fast in the United States, and even now it is difficult to remember how comparatively short a time it was before The Road to Serfdom appeared that the most extreme kind of economic planning had been seriously advocated and the model of Russia held up for imitation by men who were soon to play an important role in public affairs. ... Be it enough to mention that in 1934 the newly established National Planning Board devoted a good deal of attention to the example of planning provided by these four countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody's permission or to obey anybody's orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
...the case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
It is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
There can be no doubt that besides the regular types of the circulating medium, such as coin, notes and bank deposits, which are generally recognised to be money or currency, and the quantity of which is regulated by some central authority or can at least be imagined to be so regulated, there exist still other forms of media of exchange which occasionally or permanently do the service of money. Now while for certain practical purposes we are accustomed to distinguish these forms of media of exchange from money proper as being mere substitutes for money, it is clear that, other things equal, any increase or decrease of these money substitutes will have exactly the same effects as an increase or decrease of the quantity of money proper, and should therefore, for the purposes of theoretical analysis, be counted as money.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
[The] impersonal process of the market ... can be neither just nor unjust, because the results are not intended or foreseen.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism. ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different spheres which ought not to be confused.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
[T]he power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work? And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
[I]t is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed, it is very probable that, by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached. It is because we do not yet know which of the many competing new opinions will prove itself the best that we wait until it has gained sufficient support.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Justice, like liberty and coercion, is a concept which, for the sake of clarity, ought to be confined to the deliberate treatment of men by other men.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavour consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection -- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The [classical] liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people -- he is not an egalitarian -- but he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
In the United States, where it has become almost impossible to use "liberal" in the sense in which I have used it, the term "libertarian" has been used instead. It may be the answer; but for my part I find it singularly unattractive. For my taste it carries too much the flavor of a manufactured term and of a substitute. What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies -- these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism, and sincerely hate all manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
...if we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change "orderly."
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.
-- Friedrich August von Hayek
 
The authority of local government was similarly attacked. The not inconsiderable power of the Länder disappeared as a result of the decree of 28 February [1933] and the manipulated elections which followed. Control of the police passed into the hands of the NSDAP. ... Local elections were abolished and Reich Administrators ... were appointed to rule in place of the locally elected heads of government. On 30 January 1934 all local assemblies were abolished, and states were made totally subservient to central rule.
-- Paul Hayes
 
Unlike ordinary legislation, a constitution is enacted by the people themselves in their sovereign capacity and is therefore the paramount law.
-- Justice Frank Cruise Haymond
 
There have existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men – the lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power.
-- Robert Y. Hayne
 
The root of the evil... lay not in corruption but in the system which bred it, the alliance between industrialists and politicians which produced benefits in the form of tariffs, public lands, and federal subsidies.
-- Samuel P. Hays
 
If you really want to compete with Russia and China to prevent the 21st Century from being dominated by a new axis of evil, you must first defeat the Church of Global Warming. As long as that’s the official state religion of the Western world, we haven’t got a prayer.
-- John Hayward
 
Causes that live by politics, die by politics.
-- Steven F. Hayward
 
The monetary managers are fond of telling us that they have substituted 'responsible money management' for the gold standard. But there is no historic record of responsible paper money management ... The record taken as a whole is one of hyperinflation, devaluation and monetary chaos.
-- Henry Hazlitt
 
The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.
-- Henry Hazlitt
 
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
-- William Hazlitt
 
The only vice that can not be forgiven is hypocrisy.
-- William Hazlitt
 
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
-- William Hazlitt
 
The most fluent talkers or the most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.
-- William Hazlitt
 
Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice.
-- Hearst newspapers nationwide
 
We hold that the greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong, that in the exercise thereof people have an inviolable right to express their unbridled thoughts on all topics and personalities, being liable only for the use of that right.
-- William Randolph Hearst
 
Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster.
-- William Randolph Hearst
 
We hold that no person or set of persons can properly establish a standard of expression for others.
-- William Randolph Hearst
 
When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at hand.
-- William Randolph Hearst
 
Fraud may consist as well in the suppression of what is true as in the representation of what is false. If a man professing to answer a question, select those facts only which are likely to give a credit to the person of whom he speaks, and keep back the rest, he is a more artful knave than he who tells a direct falsehood.
-- Justice Heath
 
We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.
-- Chris Hedges
 
This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths.
-- Simon Heffer
 
When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 
The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 
Freedom is the fundamental character of the will, as weight is of matter... That which is free is the will. Will without freedom is an empty word.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 
What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 
The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 
The present homeschooling laws are, at best, a poor compromise between a highly structured, two hundred billion dollar a year industry and the principles and beliefs of a handful of parents.
-- Helen Hegener
 
Our tightly controlled educational system mocks the promise of democracy. With a closed educational system we simply cannot have an open political system. The current situation allows the government and big business to manufacture and maintain our culture for us, and in turn, control remains in the hands of the experts and institutions. The ability to change this situation is in the hands of the individuals and families who understand why change is necessary.
-- Helen Hegener
 
All special charters of freedom must be abrogated where the universal law of freedom is to flourish.
-- Heinrich Heine
 
Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
-- Heinrich Heine
 
Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
-- Heinrich Heine
 
Freedom is a new religion, the religion of our time.
-- Heinrich Heine
 
The same fact that Boccaccio offers in support of religion might be adduced in behalf of a republic: "It exists in spite of its ministers."
-- Heinrich Heine
 
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
The great trouble with religion – any religion – is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence. One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason – but one cannot have both.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
The human race divides itself politically into those who want to be controlled, and those who have no such desire.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
An armed society is a polite society.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Place your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously—after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
The whole principle is wrong. It’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is to never let them find out.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Goodness without wisdom always accomplished evil.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily.  All other "sins" are invented nonsense.  (Hurting yourself is not a sin - just stupid.)
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Political tags -- such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth -- are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you may not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything -- you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Love your country, but never trust its government.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Limiting the freedom of news ‘just a little bit’ is in the same category within the classic example ‘a little bit pregnant.’
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
The two highest achievements of the human mind are the twin concepts of "loyalty" and "duty". Whenever these twin concepts fall into disrepute, get out of there fast! You may possibly save yourself, but it is too late to save that society. It is doomed.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
...[A] fool cannot be protected from his folly. If you attempt to do so, you will not only arouse his animosity but also you will be attempting to deprive him of whatever benefit he is capable of deriving from experience. Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
 
There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
-- Heisenberg
 
Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
-- Lillian Hellman
 
A careful examination of what is happening behind the scenes reveals that all of these interests are working in concert with the masters of the Kremlin in order to create what some refer to as a “New World Order.” Private organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, the Dartmouth Conference, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the Atlantic Institute, and the Bilderberg Group serve to disseminate and to coordinate the plans for this so-called new world order in powerful business, financial, academic, and official circles.
-- Jesse Helms
 
We are now considering legislation based on statistics that include name-calling at public rallies as crimes. Are we going on to the school yards of this country and when two kids get angry with each other and call each other names -- what are we going to do, cart them over to the reformatory or add them to the list of 'hate crimes' perpetrators? This is ridiculous.
-- Jesse Helms
 
To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or knaves.
-- Claude-Adrien Helvetius
 
Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function.
-- Ernest Hemingway
 
It is a sad reminder that many in the media are not interested in journalism but progressive advocacy.
-- Mollie Hemingway
 
Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit.
-- Robert Hemphill
 
If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.
-- Robert Hemphill
 
The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage.
-- Hazel Henderson
 
Satire dramatizes better than any other use of it, the inherent contradiction of free speech – that it functions best when what is being said is at its most outrageous.
-- Tony Hendra
 
Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't need them and the bad people don't follow them so what good are they?
-- Ammon Hennacy
 
An anarchist is anyone who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do.
-- Ammon Hennacy
 
Force is the weapon of the weak.
-- Ammon Hennacy
 
...The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to guarantee the existence of state military forces that can serve as a counterweight to a standing federal army. Thus, it seems fair to say, the scope of any rights enjoyed by the states under the 2nd Amendment would be determined by the goal of preserving an independent military force not under direct federal control.
-- Dennis Hennigan
 
I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed.
-- Matthew Henry
 
There is no well-defined boundary between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in one domain and sometimes in the other.
-- O. Henry
 
...Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed...so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger.
-- Patrick Henry
 
Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of freemen. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
-- Patrick Henry
 
It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things, which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. ... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
-- Patrick Henry
 
Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?
-- Patrick Henry
 
I have the highest veneration of those Gentleman, -- but, Sir, give me leave to demand, what right had they to say, We, the People? My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of the confederation. If the States be not the agents of this compact, it must be one of great consolidated National Government of the people of all the States.
-- Patrick Henry
 
It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.
-- Patrick Henry (False)
 
Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.
-- Patrick Henry
 
The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun.
-- Patrick Henry
 
We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it.
-- Patrick Henry
 
Why do we love this trial by jury? Because it prevents the hand of oppression from cutting you off ... This gives me comfort—that, as long as I have existence, my neighbors will protect me.
-- Patrick Henry
 
Let Mr. Madison tell me when did liberty ever exist when the sword and the purse were given up from the people? Unless a miracle shall interpose, no nation ever did, nor ever can retain its liberty after the loss of the sword and the purse.
-- Patrick Henry
 
It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it.
-- Patrick Henry
 
The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.
-- Patrick Henry
 
Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.... O sir, we  should have fine times, indeed, if to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people!
-- Patrick Henry
 
Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence be the_real_object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?
-- Patrick Henry
 
Have we the means of resisting disciplined armies, when our only defence, the militia, is put in the hands of Congress?
-- Patrick Henry
 
If we would be free, if we mean to hold inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have so long contended, if we mean not basely to abandon the noble cause for which we have so long endured, and to which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon, until the glorious object of our contest should be obtained, then we must fight! I repeat Sir, we must fight! A call to arms and an appeal to the God of hosts is all that we have left.
-- Patrick Henry
 
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.
-- Patrick Henry
 
We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it.
-- Patrick Henry
 
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!
-- Patrick Henry
 
It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace -- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
-- Patrick Henry
 
The great object is, that every man be armed.
-- Patrick Henry
 
No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
-- Patrick Henry
 
Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices – taking advantage of our freedom of speech – who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.
-- Nat Hentoff
 
Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season.
-- Heraclitus
 
Nothing endures but change.
-- Heraclitus
 
The people must fight for their laws as for their walls.
-- Heraclitus
 
Man's character is his fate.
-- Heraclitus
 
Socialism is but Catholicism addressing itself not to the soul but to the sense of men... [Both implore you to] accept authority, accept the force which it employs, resign yourself to all-powerful managers, give up the free choice and the free act... They both seek to sacrifice man.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
If government half a century ago had provided us with all our dinners and breakfasts, it would be the practice of our orators today to assume the impossibility of our providing for ourselves.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation. It is the prolonged sacrifice of the rights of some persons at the bidding and for the satisfaction of other persons. The ruling idea of the politician - stated rather bluntly - is that those who are opposed to him exist for the purpose of being made to serve his ends, if he can get power enough in his hands to force these ends upon them.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
It is not laissez-faire that has failed. That would be an ill day for men. What has failed is the courage to see what is true and speak it to the people, to point to the true remedies.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
Politics must be the battle of the principles... the principle of liberty against the principle of force.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
... every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
True liberty cannot exist apart from the full rights of property, for property is the only crystallized form of free faculties...The whole meaning of socialism is a systematic glorification of force... No literary phrases about social organisms are potent enough to evaporate the individual, who is the prime, indispensable, irreducible element.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
If we cannot learn, if the only effect upon us of the presence of the dynamiter in our midst is to make us multiply punishments, invent restrictions, increase the number of our official spies, forbid public meetings, interfere with the press, put up gratings -- as in one country they propose to do -- in our House of Commons, scrutinize visitors under official microscopes, request them, as at Vienna, and I think now at Paris also, to be good enough to leave their greatcoats in the vestibules ... I venture to prophesy that there lies before us a bitter and an evil time.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
[Socialism] is a creed even more denigrating than Catholicism, but it offers more tangible bribes for its acceptance.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
How should it happen that the individual should be without rights, but the combination of individuals should possess unlimited rights?
-- Auberon Herbert
 
And what sort of philosophical doctrine is this -- that numbers confer unlimited rights, that they take from some persons all rights over themselves, and vest these rights in others. ... How, then, can the rights of three men exceed the rights of two men? In what possible way can the rights of three men absorb the rights of two men, and make them as if they had never existed. ... It is not possible to suppose, without absurdity, that a man should have no rights over his own body and mind, and yet have a 1/10,000,000th share in unlimited rights over all other bodies and minds?
-- Auberon Herbert
 
We hold that what one man cannot morally do, a million men cannot morally do, and government, representing many millions of men, cannot do.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
Force and reason -- which last is the essence of the moral act -- are at the two opposite poles. The one who compels his neighbor... treats him, not as a being with reason, but as an animal in whom reason is not.
-- Auberon Herbert
 
Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security.
-- Frank Herbert
 
If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
-- Frank Herbert
 
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy.
-- Frank Herbert
 
Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer.
-- Frank Herbert
 
Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie: A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby.
-- George Herbert
 
One sword keeps another in the sheath.
-- George Herbert
 
[Communist Goals for America:]\\ - Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”\\ - Control schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda.\\ - Soften curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put party line in textbooks. Control student newspapers.\\ - Infiltrate churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion (i.e. “social justice,” “liberation theology”).\\ - Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”\\ - Discredit American culture.\\ - Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and divorce.\\ - Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.\\
-- Albert S. Herlong, Jr.
 
There is a system of terroristic states—the real terror network—that has spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere over the past several decades, and which is deeply rooted in the corporate interest and sustaining political-military-financial propaganda mechanisms of the United States and its allies in the Free World.
-- Edward Herman
 
Make sure what you risk is yours to lose.
-- L. M. Heroux
 
No man has ever ruled other men for their own good.
-- George D. Herron
 
The possession of power over others is inherently destructive both to the possessor of the power and to those over whom it is exercised.
-- George D. Herron
 
The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop.
-- Alexander Ivanovich Herzen
 
Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism. ... The left's attack on corporate capitalism is, when examined, an attack on economic forms possible only in collusion between authoritarian government and bureaucratized, nonentrepreneurial business. It is unfortunate that many New Leftists are so uncritical as to accept this premise as indicating that all forms of capitalism are bad ...
-- Karl Hess
 
Any attempt to replace a personal conscience by a collective conscience does violence to the individual and is the first step toward totalitarianism.
-- Herman Hesse
 
Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
-- Herman Hesse
 
As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it's much, much bigger than that. I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated.
-- Charlton Heston
 
Here's my credo. There are no good guns, There are no bad guns. A gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad thing. Any gun in the hands of a good man is no threat to anyone, except bad people.
-- Charlton Heston
 
Political correctness is simply tyranny with manners.
-- Charlton Heston
 
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
-- Granville Hicks
 
The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself.
-- Granville Hicks
 
The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of these elements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to permit uprising. Therefore, the heads of provinces, official agents, and deputies are ordered to collect all the weapons mentioned above and turn them over to the government.
-- Toyotomi Hideyoshi
 
Democrats and Republicans alike support the "War on Drugs." Federal, state, and local police make more than a million drug arrests yearly. Drug cases clog the courts. More than 60% of federal prison cells and about 30% of state prison cells hold drug offenders. No-knock drug raiders nullify the Fourth Amendment every day. Yet illicit drugs continue to pour onto the market, and they are readily available throughout the land. Looks like another failed policy. But politicians say more money will win the war. For fiscal 1996, President Clinton has requested a record $14.6 billion for this exercise in futility. State and local government will also spend huge sums. Who benefits? Posturing politicians and puritanical zealots, of course, but also the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs Service, Coast Guard, FBI, and the rest of the drug warriors. Police love the drug war, because the forfeiture laws it inspired allow them to seize and keep private property with impunity. Corrupt cops get fabulous bribes, and corruption therefore runs rampant.
-- Robert Higgs
 
It would take little more than $50 billion to raise every poor person above the official poverty line, yet the percentage of the population classified as poor hardly budges, while annual welfare spending amounts to four times that much. Where's the money going?
-- Robert Higgs
 
But politicians who talk about failed policies are just blowing smoke. Government policies succeed in doing exactly what they are supposed to do: channeling resources bilked from the general public to politically organized and influential interests groups.
-- Robert Higgs
 
The mistakes made by Congress wouldn't be so bad if the next Congress didn't keep trying to correct them.
-- Cullen Hightower
 
Talk is cheap -- except when Congress does it.
-- Cullen Hightower
 
Communism is not a creation of the masses to overthrow the Banking establishment, but rather a creation of the Banking establishment to overthrow and enslave the people.
-- Anthony J. Hilder
 
I have said I do not dread industrial corporations as instruments of power to destroy this country, because there are a thousand agencies which can regulate, restrain and control them; but there is a corporation we may all dread. That corporation is the federal government. From the aggressions of this corporation, there can be no safety, if it is allowed to go beyond the well defined limits of its powers. I dread nothing so much as the exercise of ungranted and doubtful powers by the government. It is, in my opinion, the danger of dangers to the future of this country. Let us be sure to keep it always within its limits. If this great, ambitious, ever growing corporation becomes oppressive, who shall check it? If it becomes too wayward who shall control it? If it becomes unjust, who shall trust it? As sentinels of the country’s watchtower, Senators, I beseech you to watch and guard with sleepless dread, that corporation which can make all property and rights, all states and people, all liberty and hope its plaything in an hour, and its victims forever.
-- Benjamin H. Hill
 
The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians and social workers as ominous and dangerous.
-- W. G. Hill
 
If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor.
-- George Stillman Hillard
 
What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Law: all the rest is interpretation.
-- Hillel
 
There is no substitute under the heavens for productive labor. It is the process by which dreams become realities. It is the process by which idle visions become dynamic achievements.
-- Gordon B. Hinckley
 
Pitiful is the one who, fearing failure, makes no beginning.
-- Hindu Saying
 
Idleness and lack of occupation tend -- nay are dragged -- towards evil.
-- Hippocrates
 
Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit...
-- Hippocrates
 
The crucial distinction between systems...was no longer ideological.  The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could -- or should -- be the property of the state.
-- Christopher Hitchens
 
There is a utilitarian case for free expression. It recognizes that the freedom to speak must also be insisted on for the person who thinks differently, because it is pointless to support only free speech for people who agree with you. It is not only unprincipled to want that, but also self-defeating. For your own sake, you need to know how other people think.
-- Christopher Hitchens
 
We are Socialists, we are enemies of the capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.
-- Adolf Hitler (False)
 
Without law and order our nation cannot survive.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.
-- Adolf Hitler (False)
 
In relation to the political decontamination of our public life, the government will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation’s moral and material health. The whole educational system, theater, film, literature, the press and broadcasting – all these will be used as a means to this end.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
Basically National Socialism and Marxism are the same.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
Society's needs come before the individual's needs.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
A decision of the Fuhrer in the express form of a law or decree may not be scrutinized by a judge. In addition, the judge is bound by any other decision of the Fuhrer, provided that they are clearly intended to declare law.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
Why nationalize industry when you can nationalize the people?
-- Adolf Hitler
 
Being daily better informed about their knowledge than my adversaries themselves, I argued till finally one day they applied the one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
... we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so. Indeed I would go so far as to say that the underdog is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
How fortunate for governments that people do not think. There is no thinking except in giving and executing commands. If it were otherwise human society could not exist.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies, but would be ashamed to tell big lies.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The party ... must not become a servant of the masses, but their master. ... The unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
Gold is not neccesary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state, without an ounce of gold behind it. Anyone who sells above the set prices, let him be marched off to a concentration camp. That's the bastion of money.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
Believe me, National Socialism would not be worth anything if it were to be confined to Germany and did not secure the rule of the superior race over the whole world for at least one or two thousand years.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The great masses of the people ... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it... Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. ... Here the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
What luck for the rulers that men do not think.
-- Adolf Hitler (Questionable)
 
This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilised nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
-- Adolf Hitler (False)
 
The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
National Socialism will use its own revolution for establishing a new world order.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own pride is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole; that pride and conceitedness, the feeling that the individual ... is superior, so far from being merely laughable, involve great dangers for the existence of the community that is a nation; that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and the will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of interests of the individual. ... By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with the democratic order.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
For the folk-community does not exist on the fictitious value of money but on the results of productive labour, which is what gives money its value.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
The government will make use of these powers only insofar as they are essential for carrying out vitally necessary measures.... The separate existence of the federal states will not be done away.... The number of cases in which an internal necessity exists for having recourse to such law is in itself a limited one.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already. … What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'
-- Adolf Hitler
 
We have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth … at a very early age. … This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.
-- Adolf Hitler
 
Fundamental, Bible believing people do not have the right to indoctrinate their children in their religious beliefs because we, the state, are preparing them for the year 2000, when America will be part of a one-world global society and their children will not fit in.
-- Peter Hoagland
 
In their great wisdom, our Founding Fathers, gathered in Philadelphia to draft the new U.S. Constitution, gave the sole authority to declare war to the U.S. Congress. ... our Founders understood that it was essential, to secure a representative form of republican self-government, that the power to declare war must be in the hands of Congress, and not in the Executive Branch. ... Nothing has transpired in the intervening centuries to justify any alteration in their wise decision. Under our Federal Constitution, only the Congress has the power to declare war, and that must remain a cardinal principle. In recent decades, we have seen an erosion of that Constitutional principle, and I fully concur that this erosion must be halted and reverse.
-- Gen. Joseph P. Hoar
 
Common sense would dictate that increased federal regulations help preserve the interests of established business by raising the market entry price of newer competitors.
-- William P. Hoar
 
A study by Michael Tanner, Stephen Moore, and David Hartman of the Cato Institute has revealed that in 40 states, it pays more for one to be on welfare than to accept a job at $8.00 per hour; in 17 states, welfare pays more than work at $10.00 per hour; and in six states plus the District of Columbia, welfare totals more than working for $12.00 hourly. The study also showed that in 29 states, welfare benefits are worth more than the average secretary's pay; in nine states, such benefits are equal to more than the average starting salary for a teacher; and in six states, welfare pays more than an entry-level position for a computer programmer. When the entire package is computed, welfare amounts to the (pretax) equivalent of a $30,500 wage in Massachusetts, $32,200 in Alaska, and $36,400 in Hawaii.
-- William P. Hoar
 
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is so careful about the accountability of others that it ducks its own accountability altogether -- meaning that it takes six years longer to pass on its approval than it does for the same drug or medical device to be approved in other developed nations. That comes at a price: Two-thirds of the cost of a new drug is for it to meet the requirements of the FDA.
-- William P. Hoar
 
Statists relish "crises" because they can be used to force more controls into our lives.
-- William P. Hoar
 
If ... our bureaucratic masters are becoming more akin to Soviet-style or Eastern European counterparts, it was rarely seen as a plus that those central schemers had wonderful intentions with their five-year plans. Such goals as "job safety," "equality," and freedom from "discrimination," depending on their definitions, may be good things for society, but they were never intended to be the business of the federal government.
-- William P. Hoar
 
They that approve a private opinion, call it an opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy: and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.
-- Thomas Hobbes
 
Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
-- Thomas Hobbes
 
A covenant not to defend myself from force by force is always void. For ... no man can transfer or lay down his Right to save himself. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. ... [The right] to defend ourselves [is the] summe of the Right of Nature.
-- Thomas Hobbes
 
A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to.
-- Thomas Hobbes
 
Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.
-- Thomas Hobbes
 
When we strip teachers of their professional judgment, we forfeit the educational vitality we prize. When we quell controversy for the sake of congeniality, we deprive democracy of its mentors.
-- Justice Gregory Hobbs Jr.
 
The tendency of all strong governments has always been to suppress liberty, partly in order to ease the processes of rule, partly from sheer disbelief in innovation.
-- John A. Hobson
 
Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure.
-- William Earnest Hocking
 
It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.
-- A. A. Hodge
 
Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master.
-- Thomas Hodgskin
 
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
-- Ralph Hodgson
 
What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.
-- Friedrich Hoelderlin
 
Do we desire to be cradled, and then carried throughout life to our graves by this partisan propelled bureaucratic monstrosity? ...as individuals of sovereign dignity, are we now so terrified, bewildered, and impotent that our main purpose is to seek asylum from the potential hazards of freedom? Have we no faith in our natural strengths and abilities?
-- Sergei Hoff
 
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
-- Jimmy Hoffa
 
Don't let any man into your cab, your home, or your heart, unless he's a friend of labor.
-- Jimmy Hoffa
 
I doubt if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and for power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
One realizes that one of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities. On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats -- we know it not.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
You can never get enough of what you don't really need.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
It is maintained that a society is free only when dissenting minorities have room to throw their weight around. As a matter of fact, a dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
We clamour for equality chiefly in areas where we cannot ourselves hope to obtain excellence.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
People unfit for freedom - who cannot do much with it - are hungry for power. The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities. The desire for power is basically an attribute of a "have not" type of self.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
There can be no freedom without freedom to fail.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning- from minding other people's business- and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power. The indications are that such an impairment is brought about not by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but by distributing and diversifying power and pitting one category or unit of power against the other. Where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and, above all, in the categories and units of power.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our lives.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.
-- Eric Hoffer
 
Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.
-- Abbie Hoffman
 
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
-- Abbie Hoffman
 
I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new conciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman
 
I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman
 
Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preperations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman
 
The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience, makes it posible with their help, and after suitable internal and external perparation... to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak... I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug.
-- Dr. Albert Hoffman
 
Adolf Hitler's life style is simple. He never drinks alcohol and does not smoke.
-- Heinrich Hoffmann
 
A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.
-- Richard Hofstadter
 
There is no such thing as a majority right. Only those who understand and act according to this principle can promote true freedom.
-- Harry H. Hoiles
 
To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils.
-- Thomas Holcroft
 
Taking into account all levels of government, the net tax rate of those born in 1920 is 29% over their lifetimes, rising gradually to 34% for those born in 1980. For the generation born in 1994, it is 84%, and reduced only to 72% by the "extreme" Republican budget proposals. Is it fair for our future citizens to keep only 16% or 28% of their earned income?
-- Fred Holden
 
The WTO is dejure [legally] world government.
-- William Holder
 
[U]nder the United States Constitution, effective population-control programs, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
-- John Holdren
 
You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.
-- Billie Holiday
 
I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
-- Billie Holiday
 
I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.
-- Billie Holiday
 
Perfect love holds the secret of the world's perfect liberty.
-- Josiah Gilbert Holland
 
The cry of the soul is for freedom. It longs for liberty, from the date of its first conscious moments.
-- Josiah Gilbert Holland
 
Another perceived attribute of intellectuals that needs rethinking and revision: the assumption that they are deeply and unequivocally committed to personal, political and intellectual freedom and especially free expression…many Western intellectuals’ commitment to intellectual freedom is selective at best.
-- Paul Hollander
 
[T]he greatest problem facing the United States today is not racism; it is the disappearance of the can-do attitude that built the country, ... We’ve lost the sense of individual responsibility for our problems, and that’s bad enough. But what’s worse, we’re losing faith in our ability to solve our problems. This acquired sense of helplessness is catastrophic, and it has paralyzed large swaths of the American public – rural, urban and suburban. … Encouraging dependence upon government not only creates generations of helpless people; it inures them to government’s ineffectiveness.
-- Laura Hollis
 
The president of the American Bar Association begins a nationwide tour, giving speeches on the dangers of Treaty Law: 'The doctrine that the treaty power is unlimited and omnipotent and may be used to OVERRIDE the Constitution and the Bill of Rights...is a doctrine of recent origin and largely derived from Missouri v. Holland.'
-- Frank E. Holman
 
Society is always engaged in a vast conspiracy to preserve itself -- at the expense of the new demands of each new generation.
-- John Haynes Holmes
 
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
For my part I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape, than that the government should play an ignoble part.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase “due process of law” there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country... Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the sweeping command, 'Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech.'
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker’s enthusiasm for the result.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi sovereign that can be identified; although some decisions with which I have disagreed seem to me to have forgotten the fact.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Whatever disagreement there may be as to the scope of the phrase "due process of law" there can be no doubt that it embraces the fundamental conception of a fair trial, with opportunity to be heard.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted with a view to the protection of the colored race, but has been found to be equally important in its application to the rights of all.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be — that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy -- I don't disparage envy but I don't accept it as legitimately my master.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most he can for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Once the mind has been stretched by a new idea, it will never again return to its original size.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky but the articulate voice of some sovereign or quasi-sovereign that can be identified.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Free competition is worth more to society than it costs.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe…that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market… That at any rate is the theory of our constitution.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact.
-- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We felt, we still feel, the passion of life to it's top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from bondage of irrational fear.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
There's nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
The only prize much cared for by the powerful is power.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
 
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
 
The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
 
Freedom is the ferment of freedom. The moistened sponge drinks up water greedily; the dry one sheds it.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
 
There never was an idea stated that woke men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
 
Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
 
Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
 
It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.
-- John Holt
 
Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.
-- John Holt
 
No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.
-- John Holt
 
Education -- compulsory schooling, compulsory learning -- is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can.
-- John Holt
 
What children need is not new and better curriculum but access to more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them.
-- John Holt
 
No one is more truly helpless, more completely a victim, than he who can neither choose nor change nor escape his protectors.
-- John Holt
 
People who make careers out of helping others -- sometimes at great sacrifice, often not -- usually don't like to hear that those others might get along fine, might even get along better, without their help.
-- John Holt
 
It is the duty of a citizen in a free country not to fit into society but to make society.
-- John Holt
 
I believe that we learn best when we, not others are deciding what we are going to learn, and when we are choosing the people, materials, and experiences from which we will be learning.
-- John Holt
 
The most important thing any teacher has to learn, not to be learned in any school of education I ever heard of, can be expressed in seven words: Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.
-- John Holt
 
There can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth.
-- George Jacob Holyoake
 
The doctrine that man is infinitely tough and resourceful and not easily cheated of his freedom to sin.
-- George C. Homans
 
I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.
-- Homer
 
To speak his thoughts is every freeman's right, in peace and war, in council and in fight.
-- Homer
 
If one shoots at a king, one must not miss.
-- Sidney Hook
 
To silence criticism is to silence freedom.
-- Sidney Hook
 
One of the central assumptions of the concept of democracy, perhaps its most central assumption, is that by and large human beings are better judges of their own interests…. The operating maxim of the democratic ideology is, “Whoever wears the shoe knows best where it pinches.”
-- Sidney Hook
 
Honest difference of views and honest debate are not disunity. They are the vital process of policy among free men.
-- Herbert Hoover
 
It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice.
-- Herbert Hoover
 
Freedom conceives that the mind and spirit of man can be free only if he is free to pattern his own life, to develop his own talents, free to earn, to spend, to save, to acquire property as the security of his old age and his family.
-- Herbert Hoover
 
Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of 'emergency'. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And 'emergency' became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.
-- Herbert Hoover
 
Truth telling, I have found, is the key to responsible citizenship. The thousands of criminals I have seen in 40 years of law enforcement have had one thing in common: every single one was a liar.
-- J. Edgar Hoover
 
Justice is incidental to law and order.
-- J. Edgar Hoover
 
The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.
-- J. Edgar Hoover
 
I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.
-- J. Edgar Hoover
 
The Communist threat from without must not blind us to the Communist threat from within. The latter is reaching into the very heart of America through its espionage agents and a cunning, defiant, and lawless communist party, which is fanatically dedicated to the Marxist cause of world enslavement and destruction of the foundations of our republic.
-- J. Edgar Hoover
 
There is no doubt that America is now the prime target of international communism.
-- J. Edgar Hoover
 
We must now face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced because many of us do not recognize the means used to advance them. ... The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a Conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst.
-- J. Edgar Hoover
 
If the right to vote were expanded to seven year olds ... its policies would most definitely reflect the ‘legitimate concerns’ of children to have ‘adequate’ and ‘equal’ access to ‘free’ french fries, lemonade and videos.
-- Hans-Hermann Hoppe
 
The state spends much time and effort persuading the public that it is not really what it is and that the consequences of its actions are positive rather than negative.
-- Hans Hermann Hoppe
 
Who then is free? The wise who can command his passions, who fears not want, nor death, nor chains, firmly resisting his appetites and despising the honors of the world, who relies wholly on himself, whose angular points of character have all been rounded off and polished.
-- Horace
 
Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.
-- Horace
 
Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.
-- Horace
 
And when all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy is Warre; which provideth for every man, by Victory, or Death.
-- Horace
 
Carpe Diem. (Seize the day.)
-- Horace
 
Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.
-- Horace
 
“Painters and poets,” you say, “have always had an equal license in bold invention.” We know; we claim the liberty for ourselves and in turn we give it to others.
-- Horace
 
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 individual soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political officials 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 the 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.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
Every day, IRS agents levy liens on homes, bank accounts, and businesses; they confiscate cars, furniture, boats, and other personal property without the constitutional protections of due notice, hearing, and due process. If a person forcibly resists, government agents kill him for “resisting arrest.”
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
Every single American can exclaim, 'Nothing justifies what they did in New York and Washington,' not even the bombs that our government has dropped on them for ten years or the embargo that has caused the deaths of so many children. That's of course true…The issue is simply an acceptance of reality and a fundamental fact of life: When governments do bad things to people, people sometimes retaliate.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
Another major reason why crime is increasing is that crime pays, and in our tax-ridden, regulation crushed economy, many people cannot economically survive through low-end jobs. ... 'The income that offenders can earn in the world of crime, as compared with the world of work, all too often makes crime appear to be the better choice.' In Washington, D.C., it costs $7,000 in city fees to open a pushcart. In California, up to eighty federal and state licenses are required to open a small business. In New York, a medallion to operate a taxicab costs $150,000. More than 700 occupations in the United States require a government license. Throughout the country, church soup kitchens are being closed by departments of health. No wonder so many people turn to crime and violence to survive.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
There is no difference in principle, ... between the economic philosophy of Nazism, socialism, communism, and fascism and that of the American welfare state and regulated economy.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the United States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it. Statists believe that their lives -- their very being -- are a privilege that the state has given to them. They believe that everything they do is -- and should be -- dependent on the consent of the government. Thus, statists support such devices as income taxation, licensing laws, regulations, passports, trade restrictions, and the like.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
[T]ake the war on drugs. The average American says, “The war on drugs has been beneficial.” The rest of us see reality. This war has destroyed thousands of Americans. It is also a pretext for government agents to rob innocent people in airports and on the highways -- they seize and confiscate large amounts of cash and say to their victims: “Sue us if you don’t like it.” And more and more judges, politicians, intelligence agents, and law-enforcement officers are on the take -- as dependent on the drug-war largess as the drug lords themselves.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
The core issue facing the American people is this: Have the guardians become the terrorists?
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
Of course, the proponents of political tyranny are usually well-motivated. Those who enacted the gun-registration law in California point to criminals who have used semiautomatic weapons to commit horrible, murderous acts. But the illusion -- the pipe dream -- is that bad acts can be prevented by the deprivation of liberty. They cannot be! Life is always insecure. The only choice is between liberty and insecurity, on the one hand, and insecurity and enslavement on the other. The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government. This is why the gun owners of California might ultimately go down in history as among the greatest and most courageous patriots of our time.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
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.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
The lesson that Americans today have forgotten or never learned -- the lesson which our ancestors tried so hard to teach -- is that the greatest threat to our lives, liberty, property, and security is not some foreign government, as our rulers so often tell us. The greatest threat to our freedom and well-being lies with our own government!.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. ... [T]he long-term solution is to dismantle, not reform, the iron fist of the welfare state and the controlled economy. This includes the end (not the reform) of the IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the SEC, the FDA, HUD, the departments of HHS, Labor, Agriculture, and energy, and every other agency that takes money from some and gives it to others or interferes with peaceful behavior.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
Contrary to everything our rulers tell us, and everything that our schoolteachers are teaching the children of this nation, the biggest threat to the lives and well-being of the American people lies not with some foreign government. The biggest threat to the American people today lies with the United States government. And while gun ownership stands as a barrier to potential, Nazi-like behavior, the long-term solution is to dismantle, not reform, the iron fist of the welfare state and the controlled economy. This includes the end (not the reform) of the IRS, the DEA, the BATF, the SEC, the FDA, HUD, the departments of HHS, Labor, Agriculture, and Energy, and every other agency that takes money from some and gives it to others or interferes with peaceful behavior. It entails the repeal of all laws that permit such conduct. And it means the privatization of most of the bureaucrats who work for the U.S. government.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people’s lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary -- for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became.
-- Jacob G. Hornberger
 
In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.
-- Jack Horner
 
We may feel genuinely concerned about world conditions, though such a concern should drive us into action and not into a depression.
-- Karen Horney
 
In Washington, of course, evading responsibility is an art form, so it is not always easy to tell who's responsible for which mess.
-- David Horowitz
 
The building that housed Germany's leading industrial organization prior to World War II, and for all practical purposes the Third Reich during the war, became CIA European headquarters immediately following the war. The marble decorated I.G. Farben building was intentionally spared from allied bombing runs. It was largely built by the 'Bayer Pharmaceutical' consortium that included the distributors of aspirin and heroin to U.S. markets by the 'Farbenfabriken of Elberfeld Co., 40 Stone Street, New York' according to a 1906 Medical Observer advertisement.
-- Dr. Leonard Horowitz
 
So long as people, being ill governed, suffer from hunger, criminals will never disappear. It is extremely unkind to punish those who, being suffers from hunger, are compelled to violate laws.
-- Kenkó Hoshi
 
An economy cannot long remain prosperous by government's taxing and spending more, now absorbing national output at a rate equal to the entire income of every American living west of the Mississippi. If this trend continues, America will gradually sink into the status of a Third World nation -- more unemployment, more shackles on production, more poverty.
-- John Hospers
 
By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and individual rights are performed by governments. The major crimes throughout history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy of those governments, that is, by the official representatives of governments, acting in their official capacity.
-- John Hospers
 
Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of Congress that it should be a fundamental objective of the foreign policy of the United States to support and strengthen the United Nations and to seek its development into a world federation ...with defined and limited powers adequate to preserve peace and prevent aggression through the enactment, interpretation, and enforcement of world law...
-- House Concurrent Resolution 64
 
Things may be cheaper over the hill, but there is a cost to the community in buying over there, instead of here.
-- Margaret House
 
The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall.
-- A. E. Housman
 
We do nothing controversial. We're not in the investigative business. Our only concern is giving editorial support for our ad projects.
-- Houston Chronicle
 
Nobody should claim that the war [in Iraq] is over. But certainly it can be said that the regime is finished.
-- John Howard
 
Coercion by government, the main fear of our founding fathers, is now its most common attribute.
-- Philip K. Howard
 
The liberty of the press is most generally approved when it takes liberties with the other fellow, and leaves us alone.
-- Edgar Watson Howe
 
The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic government.
-- Edgar Watson Howe
 
I express many absurd opinions. But I am not the first man to do it; American freedom consists largely in talking nonsense.
-- Edgar Watson Howe
 
These are the rules of big business... Get a monopoly; let society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics...
-- Frederick C. Howe
 
Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.
-- Elbert Hubbard
 
The man who craves disciples and wants followers is always more or less of a charlatan. The man of genuine worth and insight wants to be himself; and he wants others to be themselves, also.
-- Elbert Hubbard
 
There is no freedom on earth or in any star for those who deny freedom to others.
-- Elbert Hubbard
 
Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of a field in hope that the cow will back up to them.
-- Elbert Hubbard
 
Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.
-- Elbert Hubbard
 
Truth, in its struggles for recognition, passes through four distinct stages. First, we say it is damnable, dangerous, disorderly, and will surely disrupt society. Second, we declare it is heretical, infidelic and contrary to the Bible. Third, we say it is really a matter of no importance either one way or the other. Fourth, we aver that we have always upheld it and believed it.
-- Elbert Hubbard
 
Honesty pays, but it don't seem to pay enough to suit some people.
-- Frank McKinney Hubbard
 
Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.
-- Frank McKinney Hubbard
 
Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.
-- Kin Hubbard
 
Why doesn't the fellow who says "I'm no speechmaker" let it go at that instead of giving a demonstration?
-- Kin Hubbard
 
l'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is.
-- L. Ron Hubbard
 
I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.
-- Mike Huckabee
 
That is reserved expressly to the States and is not granted to the Federal Government by our national charter. The Federal Government has nothing to do under the Constitution with the preservation of public order. To pass this bill is to pass a bill for an unconstitutional purpose, under the guise of regulating interstate commerce.
-- George Huddleston
 
Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.
-- Jack Hugh
 
Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.
-- Jack Hugh
 
Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope. It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.'
-- Justice Charles Evans Hughes
 
A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
-- Charles Evans Hughes
 
While democracy must have its organizations and controls, its vital breath is individual liberty.
-- Justice Charles Evans Hughes
 
When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
-- Justice Charles Evans Hughes
 
It is the essence of the institutions of liberty that it be recognized that guilt is personal and cannot be attributed to the holding of opinions or to mere intent in the absence of overt acts.
-- Justice Charles Evans Hughes
 
Emergency does not create power. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency.
-- Justice Charles Evans Hughes
 
When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
-- Justice Charles Evans Hughes
 
The Constitution is what the judges say it is.
-- Justice Charles Evans Hughes
 
A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
-- Justice Charles Evans Hughes
 
The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our history abundantly attest.
-- Justice Charles Evans Hughes
 
The greater the importance to safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion.
-- Justice Charles Evans Hughes
 
The right to comment freely and criticize the action, opinions, and judgment of courts is of primary importance to the public generally. Not only is it good for the public; but it has a salutary effect on courts and judges as well.
-- James P. Hughes
 
We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.
-- Robert Hughes
 
Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.
-- Victor Hugo
 
Have no fear of robbers or murderers.  They are external dangers, petty dangers.  We should fear ourselves.  Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murders.  The great dangers are within us.  Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses?  Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.
-- Victor Hugo
 
Liberation is not deliverance.
-- Victor Hugo
 
[G]overnment theft of private money and redistribution by a government elite is communism not democracy. ... Communism has already been tried for over 70 years, and it doesn't work because people work to support themselves, not their neighbors. When the rewards are confiscated and redistributed to others, people produce less or stop producing altogether. The quantity of "goods in common" declines until the system finally collapses and everybody is hungry, not just "the poor." Then totalitarianism steps in to force people to produce (ask the Russians, the Poles, the Estonians).
-- Don Hull
 
Fiat-money systems tend to make people insatiable in their quest for ever higher monetary returns on their investments,
-- Jorg Guido Hulsmann
 
You can imagine, then, how this inflation and debt-based system, over time, will begin to change the culture of a society and its behavior. We become more materialistic than under a natural monetary system. We can’t just sit on our savings anymore, and we have to watch our investments constantly, and think about revenue constantly, because if it is not earning enough, we are actively getting poorer.
-- Jorg Guido Hulsmann
 
In a fiat money society you are more likely to increase your returns by remaining in debt and continuing to chase monetary revenue indefinitely by leveraging more and more funds.
-- Jorg Guido Hulsmann
 
It's OK to lie. It's OK to steal. It's OK to have premarital sex. It's OK to cheat or to kill if these things are part of your value system, and you clarified these values for yourself. The important thing is not what values you choose, but that you have chosen them for yourself and without coercion of parents, spouse, priest, friends, ministers or social pressure of any kind.
-- Humanist Curriculum
 
We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move towards the building of a world community...
-- Humanist Manifesto (Article 12)
 
We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds. We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move towards the building of a world community. We look toward the development of a system of world law, world order, based upon transnational government.
-- Humanist Manifesto, Article 12
 
Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few.
-- David Hume
 
Everything in the world is purchased by labor.
-- David Hume
 
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
-- David Hume
 
Southerners did not stop with an open defense of slavery. They went on to attack northern society for its 'wage slavery' and 'exploitation of workers,' using arguments repeated by socialist critics of capitalism. The southern writer who developed these arguments most extensively was George Fitzhugh, a Virginia planter and lawyer. His two books were provocatively entitled Sociology for the South: Or the Failure of the Free Society and Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters. In them, Fitzhugh defended slavery as a practical form of socialism that provided contented slaves with paternalistic masters, thereby eliminating harsh conflicts between employers and allegedly free workers. 'A Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism; it is a joint concern, in which the slave ... is far happier, because ... he is always sure of support.' ... 'The best governed countries, and which have prospered the most, have always been distinguished for the number and stringency of their laws,' he wrote; 'liberty is an evil which government is intended to correct.'
-- Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
 
Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, and one more safeguard against tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
 
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
 
Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
 
There are incalculable resources in the human spirit, once it has been set free.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
 
If [anyone] can find in Title VII ... any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not in there.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
 
Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent and debate.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
 
The ugliness of bigotry stands in direct contradiction to the very meaning of America.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
 
There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
 
None of us would trade freedom of expression for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it.
-- Hubert H. Humphrey
 
All children behave as well as they are treated.
-- Jan Hunt
 
Gun control is part and parcel of the ongoing collectivist effort to eviscerate individual sovereignty and replace it with dependence upon and allegiance to the state.
-- Lawrence Hunter
 
Some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy ... The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups.
-- Samuel Huntington
 
How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.
-- Suzanna Gratia Hupp
 
Of course drugs were fun. And that's what's so stupid about anti-drug campaigns: they don't admit that. I can't say I feel particularly scarred or lessened by my experimentation with drugs. They've gotten a very bad name.
-- Anjelica Huston
 
A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues…is on the way to totalitarianism and death.
-- Robert M. Hutchins
 
The policy of the repression of ideas cannot work and never has worked. The alternative to it is the long difficult road of education. To this the American people have committed.
-- Robert M. Hutchins
 
Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes different points of view.
-- Robert M. Hutchins
 
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
-- Robert M. Hutchins
 
Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.
-- Robert M. Hutchins
 
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism... A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
-- Aldous Huxley
 
I believe the State exists for the development of individual lives, not individuals for the development of the state.
-- Julian Huxley
 
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
 
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
 
My business is to bring my aspirations to conform to fact, not to try to harmonize fact with my aspirations.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
 
...a man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
 
What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin.
-- Thomas Henry Huxley
 
Dignity does not float down from heaven it cannot be purchased nor manufactured. It is a reward reserved for those who labor with diligence.
-- Bill Hybels
 
Free speech is meaningless unless it tolerates the speech that we hate.
-- Henry J. Hyde
 
The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities states and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as 'international bankers.' This little coterie... run our government for their own selfish ends. It operates under cover of a self-created screen...[and] seizes...our executive officers... legislative bodies... schools... courts... newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.
-- John F. Hylan
 
The advantage of national planning is its ability to remove the wastes of oligopolistic anarchy, i.e. meaningless product differentiation and an imbalance between different industries within a geographical area. It concentrates all levels of decision making in one locale and thus provide each region with a full complement of skills and occupations. This opens up new horizons of local development by making possible the social and political control of economic decision-making. Multinational corporations, in contrast, weaken political control because they span many countries and can escape national regulation.
-- Stephen Hymer
 
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
-- Hypatia of Alexandria
 
Mistrust the people and they become untrustworthy.
-- I Ching
 
Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing.
-- Michael Iapoce
 
A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.
-- Henrik Ibsen
 
You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
-- Henrik Ibsen
 
The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.
-- Henrik Ibsen
 
One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, ‘I have it,' merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.
-- Henrik Ibsen
 
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can ever help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority.
-- Henrik Ibsen
 
The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society.
-- Henrik Ibsen
 
One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to fight for freedom.
-- Henrik Ibsen
 
The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish.
-- Henrik Ibsen
 
At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.
-- Eric Idle
 
To come to know your enemy, first you must become his friend, and once you become his friend, all his defences come down. Then you can choose the most fitting method for his demise.
-- Tokugawa Ieyasu
 
Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.
-- George Iles
 
School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
-- Ivan Illich
 
Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school.
-- Ivan Illich
 
It is precisely for the protection of the minority that constitutional limitations exist. Majorities need no such protection. They can take care of themselves.
-- Illinois Supreme Court
 
The most beautiful things in the universe are the starry heavens above us and the feeling of duty within us.
-- Indian Proverb
 
When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.
-- Indian Saying
 
(i) A person is justified in using reasonable force against a public servant if the person reasonably believes the force is necessary to: (1) protect the person or a third person from what the person reasonably believes to be the imminent use of unlawful force; (2) prevent or terminate the public servant’s unlawful entry of or attack on the person’s dwelling, curtilage, or occupied motor vehicle; or (3) prevent or terminate the public servant’s unlawful trespass on or criminal interference with property lawfully in the person’s possession, lawfully in possession of a member of the person’s immediate family, or belonging to a person whose property the person has authority to protect.
-- Indiana Code
 
If a multitude is to be subjected to a plan, it must be militarized. If individuals are allowed a free choice, the plan is thrown into confusion. Bureaucracy, under an absolute ruler, or rulers, is necessary. Popular consent can be secured only by rigorous censorship and prohibition of free discussion. Espionage is a necessary part of the system, and a considerable amount of terrorism. Since private expenditure must be controlled, it is wise to keep private incomes near a subsistence level and to dole out any surplus on collective pleasures such as free holidays. We shall not understand totalitarian tyranny unless we realize that it is the result of the planned economy.
-- Dean Inge
 
It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own.
-- William Ralph Inge
 
The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.
-- William Ralph Inge
 
A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.
-- William Ralph Inge
 
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due.
-- William Ralph Inge
 
It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
-- William Ralph Inge
 
Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe is a dungeon.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
They say the religion of your fathers is good enough. Why should a father object to your inventing a better plow than he had? They say to me, do you know more than all the theologians dead? Being a perfectly modest man I say I think I do. Now we have come to the conclusion that every man has a right to think. Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
— My creed —\\ Happiness is the only good.\\ The place to be happy is here.\\ The time to be happy is now.\\ The way to be happy is to make others so.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 

-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
Love is the only bow on Life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart -- builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody -- for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, — never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf -- a philosopher or servant, -- but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
Every crime is born of necessity.  If you want less crime, you must change the conditions.  Poverty makes crime.  Want, rags, crusts, misfortune - all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal.  And what do you do with him?  You punish him.  Why not punish a man for having consumption?  The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical.  What do you do with the criminal?  You send him to the penitentiary.  Is he made better?  Worse.  The first thing you do is to try to trample out his manhood, by putting an indignity upon him.  You mark him.  You put him in stripes.  At night you put him in darkness.  His feeling for revenge grows.  You make a wild beast of him, and he comes out of that place branded in body and soul, and then you won't let him reform if he wants to.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrines of the weak.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
There will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women -- of free mothers.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men. It has been a constant pain, a perpetual terror to every good man and woman and child. It has filled the good with horror and with fear; but it has had no effect upon the infamous and base. It has wrung the hearts of the tender, it has furrowed the cheeks of the good. This doctrine never should be preached again. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
It is incredible that only idiots are absolutely sure of salvation. It is incredible that the more brain you have the less your chance is. There can be no danger in honest thought, and if the world ever advances beyond what it is to-day, it must be led by men who express their real opinions.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and Preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments would be urged.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments - there are only consequences.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
What light is to the eyes – what air is to the lungs – what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man. Without liberty, the brain is a dungeon, where the chained thoughts die with their pinions pressed against the hingeless doors.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
Courage without conscience is a wild beast.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
The Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered his wife Fausta, and his eldest son Crispus, the same year that he convened the Council of Nicea to decide whether Jesus Christ was a man or the Son of God. The council decided that Christ was consubstantial with the father. This was in the year 325. We are thus indebted to a wife-murderer for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the Savior.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes.  The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men - and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.  As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort -- as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
 
There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.
-- Daniel K. Inouye
 
Some techniques can be used only in connection with a full-scale program due to the nature of the tax situation and the need to avoid unnecessary taxpayer reaction. An example would be income tax returns compliance efforts aimed at the non-business taxpayer.
-- Internal Revenue Service Manual
 
The purpose of the IRS is to collect the proper amount of tax revenues at the least cost to the public, and in a manner that warrants the highest degree of public confidence in our integrity, efficiency and fairness. To achieve that purpose, we will encourage and achieve the highest possible degree of voluntary compliance in accordance with the tax laws and regulations...
-- Internal Revenue Service Manual
 
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
-- Eugene Ionesco
 
Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the bundles that oppress, let those who are broken go free, and break asunder every burden. Share your bread with the hungry, welcome into your house the afflicted and homeless; when you see a naked man, clothe him, and do not turn your back on your own flesh. Then your light will arise like the dawn, and your wound will quickly be healed. Your justice shall go before you, the glory of the Lord will closely follow you
-- Isaiah
 
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to prisoners.
-- Isaiah
 
This world is the prison of the believers and the paradise of the unbelievers.
-- Islamic Proverb
 
It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.
-- Molly Ivins
 
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
If Congress has the right under the Constitution to issue paper money, it was given to be used by themselves, not to be delegated to individuals or corporations.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
From the earliest ages of history to the present day there have never been thirteen millions of people associated in one political body who enjoyed so much freedom and happiness as the people of these United States. You have no longer any cause to fear dangers from abroad ... It is from within, among yourselves - from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition and inordinate thirst for power - that factions will be formed and liberty endangered ...
-- Andrew Jackson
 
I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
The Bible is the rock on which our Republic rests.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
It is apparent from the whole context of the Constitution as well as the history of the times which gave birth to it, that it was the purpose of the Convention to establish a currency consisting of the precious metals. These were adopted by a permanent rule excluding the use of a perishable medium of exchange, such as certain agricultural commodities recognized by the statutes of some States as tender for debts, or the still more pernicious expedient of paper currency.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, will rout you out.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
Every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add… artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society -- the farmers, mechanics, and laborers -- who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves.
-- Andrew Jackson
 
America is not like a blanket - one piece of unbroken cloth. America is more like a quilt - many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven together by a common thread.
-- Rev. Jesse Jackson
 
No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to flee and fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.
-- Rev. Jesse Jackson
 
Did you ever hear anyone say, “That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me.”
-- Joseph Henry Jackson
 
The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
We are not final because we are infallible, but infallible only because we are final.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
Particularly when the war power is invoked to do things to the liberties of people, or to their property or economy that only indirectly affect conduct of the war and do not relate to the engagement of the war itself, the constitutional basis should be scrutinized with care. ... I would not be willing to hold that war powers may be indefinitely prolonged merely by keeping legally alive a state of war that had in fact ended. I cannot accept the argument that war powers last as long as the effects and consequences of war for if so they are permanent -- as permanent as the war debts.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
Our forefathers found the evils of free thinking more to be endured than the evils of inquest or suppression. This is because thoughtful, bold and independent minds are essential to the wise and considered self-government.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it...No grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
Civil government cannot let any group ride roughshod over others simply because their consciences tell them to do so.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only a unanimity at the graveyard.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
There is no such thing as an achieved liberty: like electricity, there can be no substantial storage and it must be generated as it is enjoyed, or the lights go out.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his case, it follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm -- in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
[T]he arguments that have been addressed to us lead me to utter more explicit misgivings about war powers than the Court has done. The Government asserts no constitutional basis for this legislation other than this vague, undefined and undefinable 'war power.' No one will question that this power is the most dangerous one to free government in the whole catalogue of powers. It is usually invoked in haste and excitement, when calm legislative consideration of constitutional limitation is difficult. It is executed in a time of patriotic fervor that makes moderation unpopular. And, worst of all, it is interpreted by judges under the influence of the same passions and pressures. Always, as in this case, the Government urges hasty decision to forestall some emergency or serve some purpose and pleads that paralysis will result if its claims to power are denied or their confirmation delayed.
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson
 
The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth.
-- Thomas J. Jackson
 
The First Amendment says nothing about a right not to be offended. The risk of finding someone else's speech offensive is the price each of us pays for our own free speech. Free people don't run to court -- or to the principal -- when they encounter a message they don't like. They answer it with one of their own.
-- Jeff Jacoby
 
The radicals...want speech regulated by codes that proscribe certain language. They see free speech as at best a delusion, at worst a threat to the welfare of minorities and women....The most obvious (and cynical) explanation for the switched positions is the switched situations. Protesting students became established professors and administrators. For outsiders, free speech is bread and butter; for insiders, indigestion. To the new academics, unregulated free speech spells trouble.
-- Russell Jacoby
 
Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck.
-- Susan Jacoby
 
A free man is as jealous of his responsibilities as he is of his liberties.
-- Cyril James
 
When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
-- Dresden James
 
A war, even the most successfull one, is a national misfortune.
-- Helmuth James
 
Since National Socialism came to power, I have striven to make its consequences milder for its victims and to prepare the way for a change. In that, my conscience drove me -- and in the end, that is a man's duty.
-- Helmuth James
 
Today, not a numerous, but an active part of the German people are beginning to realize, not that they have been led astray, not that bad times await them, not that the war may end in defeat, but that what is happening is sin and that they are personally responsible for each terrible deed that has been committed -- naturally, not in the earthly sense, but as Christians.
-- Helmuth James
 
The instinct of ownership is fundamental in man's nature.
-- William James
 
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
-- William James
 
There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.
-- William James
 
The greatest discovery of any generation is that a living soul can alter his life by altering his attitude.
-- William James
 
Television has allowed us to create a common culture, and without it we would not have been able to accomplish our goal.
-- Dr. Morris Janowitz
 
If you believe everything you read, you better not read.
-- Japanese Proverb
 
The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour.
-- Japanese Proverb
 
The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy.
-- John Jay
 
The people are Sovereign. ... at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects... with none to govern but themselves; the citizens of America are equal as fellow citizens, and as joint tenants in the sovereignty.
-- John Jay
 
Those who own the country ought to govern it.
-- John Jay
 
The Jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy.
-- John Jay
 
Providence has given our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as privilege and interest, of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.
-- John Jay
 
The people who own the country ought to govern it.
-- John Jay
 
History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.
-- Julian Jaynes
 
Choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
-- Thomas Jefferson (False)
 
We are all doubtless bound to contribute a certain portion of our income to the support of charitable and other useful public institutions. But it is a part of our duty also to apply our contributions in the most effectual way we can to secure this object. The question then is whether this will not be better done by each of us appropriating our whole contribution to the institutions within our reach, under our own eye, and over which we can exercise some useful control? Or would it be better that each should divide the sum he can spare among all the institutions of his State or the United States? Reason and the interest of these institutions themselves, certainly decide in favor of the former practice.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
[The People] are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The general [federal] government will tend to monarchy, which will fortify itself from day to day, instead of working its own cures.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
We shall have our follies without doubt. Some one or more of them will always be afloat. But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry, not of Jesuitism. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I tolerate with utmost latitude the right of others to differ with me in opinion without imputing to them criminality. I know too well all the weaknesses and uncertainty of human reason to wonder at its different results.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Were parties here divided merely by a greediness for office,...to take a part with either would be unworthy of a reasonable or moral man.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable 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;
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Agriculture, manufacturers, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I know it will give great offence to the New England clergy, but the advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from them.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well organized and armed militia is their best security.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
You seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people' (10th Amendment). To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to any definition.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I cannot live without books.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The patriot, like the Christian, must learn to bear revilings and persecutions as a part of his duty; and in proportion as the trial is severe, firmness under it becomes more requisite and praiseworthy. It requires, indeed, self-command. But that will be fortified in proportion as the calls for its exercise are repeated.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
For the power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State (that is to say, of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
It is unfortunate, that the efforts of mankind to recover the freedom of which they have been so long deprived, will be accompanied with violence, with errors, & even with crimes. But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations. ... Let me add that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation [the Senate], where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 

-- Thomas Jefferson
 
[N]othing in the Constitution has given [the judiciary] a right to decide for the Executive, more than to the executive to decide for them. Both magistracies are equally independent in the sphere of action assigned to them… the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what are not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the Legislature & Executive also, in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all Power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes [and] delegated to that government certain definite powers and whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force. To this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an integral party, its co-states forming, as to itself, the other party. The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution the measure of its powers.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
No man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Our legislators are not sufficiently apprized of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
[T]o consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions ... would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association -- the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength: 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I am not among those who fear the people.\\ They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.\\\\ And to preserve their independence, \\ We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.\\ We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude.\\\\ If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.\\\\ Our land-holders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation.\\\\ This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagances.\\\\ And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for the second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.\\\\ Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man.\\\\ And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt.\\ Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error and error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruption of Christianity could not have been purged away.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Force (is) the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing ... this enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to it's consummation. It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an old man.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
No free man shall ever be de-barred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
-- Thomas Jefferson (False)
 
Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions in which he is competent ...\\ - To let the National Government be entrusted with the defense of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations ...\\ - The State Governments with the Civil Rights, Laws, Police and administration of what concerns the State generally.\\ - The Counties with the local concerns, and each ward direct the interests within itself.\\ It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of everyman's farm by himself, by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear... Do not be frightened from this inquiry from any fear of its consequences. If it ends in the belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise...
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
You seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy... The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I believe the States can best govern our home concerns, and the General Government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore, to see maintained that wholesome distribution of powers established by the constitution for the limitation of both; and never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold as at market.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, when to reap, we should soon want bread.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I... [proposed] three distinct grades of education, reaching all classes. 1. Elementary schools for all children generally, rich and poor. 2. Colleges for a middle degree of instruction, calculated for the common purposes of life and such as should be desirable for all who were in easy circumstances. And 3d. an ultimate grade for teaching the sciences generally and in their highest degree... The expenses of [the elementary] schools should be borne by the inhabitants of the county, every one in proportion to his general tax-rate. This would throw on wealth the education of the poor.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
It is left, therefore, to the juries, if they think the permanent judges are under any bias whatever in any cause, to take on themselves to judge the law as well as the fact. They never exercise this power but when they suspect partiality in the judges, and by the exercise of this power they have been the firmest bulwarks of English liberty.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Nothing can be more exactly and seriously true than what is there [the very words only of Jesus] stated; that but a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandising their oppressors in Church and State; that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man, has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves; that rational men not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do in fact constitute the real Anti-Christ.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, then and only then will truth, prevail over fanaticism.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are preserved to the states or to the people.' ... To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill (chartering the first Bank of the United States), have not, been delegated to the United States by the Constitution.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
I never did, or countenanced, in public life, a single act inconsistent with the strictest good faith; having never believed there was one code of morality for a public, and another for a private man.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
An elective despotism was not the government we fought for, but one which should not only be founded on true free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 
The constitutions of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property and freedom of the press.
-- Thomas Jefferson
 


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