Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
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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		 
It is a great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all it's good dispositions.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 

-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
With money we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money. Nor should our assembly [the Virginia Legislature] be deluded by the integrity of their own purposes, and conclude that these unlimited powers will never be abused, because themselves are not disposed to abuse them. They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin [Great Britain], will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price. Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Error of opinion may be tolerated when reason is left free to combat it.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied upon to set them to rights.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[My views on Christianity] are the result of a life of inquiry & reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Experience has already shown that the impeachment the Constitution has provided is not even a scarecrow.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It is the great parent of science & of virtue: and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
An equal application of law to every condition of man is fundamental.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I could think of no worse example for nations abroad, who for the first time were trying to put free electoral procedures into effect, than that of the United States wrangling over the results of our presidential election, and even suggesting that the presidency itself could be stolen by thievery at the ballot box.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[W]hensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The true theory of our Constitution is surely the wisest and best, that the States are independent as to everything within themselves, and united as to everything respecting foreign affairs. Let the General Government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and our General Government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the State, and calls for an exercise of the power of dissolution.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are only injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Tobacco is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a coordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet... We shall see if they are bold enough to take the daring stride their five lawyers have lately taken. If they do, then... I will say, that 'against this every man should raise his voice,' and more, should uplift his arm.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government or information to the people. This last is the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[We should be] determined... to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government... in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I discharge every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition Law, because I considered, and now consider, that law to be a nullity as absolute and palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I do verily believe that if the principle were to prevail of a common law being in force in the United States (which principle possesses the general government at once of all the powers of the state governments, and reduces us to a single consolidated government), it would become the most corrupt government on the earth.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
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...[we will] 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... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for[ another]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our Government to trial, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government. He was naturally distrustful of men, and inclined to gloomy apprehensions; and I was ever persuaded that a belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution, had some weight in his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birthdays, pompous meetings with Congress, and other forms of the same character, calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed possible, and to let it come on with as little shock as might be to the public mind.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Where the principle of difference [between political parties] is as substantial and as strongly pronounced as between the republicans and the monocrats of our country, I hold it as honorable to take a firm and decided part and as immoral to pursue a middle line, as between the parties of honest men and rogues, into which every country is divided.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
To preserve the freedom of the human mind then and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I am not fully informed of the practices at Harvard, but there is one from which we shall certainly vary, although it has been copied, I believe, by nearly every college and academy in the United States. That is, the holding the students all to one prescribed course of reading, and disallowing exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them for the particular vocations to which they are destined. We shall, on the contrary, allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend, and require elementary qualification only, and sufficient age.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
An individual, thinking himself injured, makes more noise than a State.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
That this privilege of giving or of withholding our monies is an important barrier against the undue exertion of prerogative, which if left altogether without control may be exercised to our great oppression; and all history shews how efficacious is its intercession for redress of grievances and re-establishment of rights, and how improvident would be the surrender of so powerful a mediator.
-- 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. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in ... the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow), working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing it’s noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. ...when all government... in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the centre 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		 
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Taxes should be continued by annual or biennial reenactments, because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse is a salutary restraint from which an honest government ought not wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[I]f we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
At home, fellow citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns, not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city or small township, but by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short periods.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The error seems not sufficiently eradicated, that the operations of the mind, as well as the acts of the body, are subject to the coercion of the laws. But our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. ... Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once forbidden as a medicine, and the potatoe as an article of food.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding, and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties, which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet devised by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I place economy among the first and most important virtues and public debt as the greatest dangers to be feared ... We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our choice between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude ... The same prudence which in private life would forbid our paying money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of public money. We are endeavoring to reduce the government to the practice of rigid economy to avoid burdening the people ...
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it's protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word 'Jesus Christ,' so that it should read 'a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.' The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it's protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[F]alsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The two principles on which our conduct towards the Indians should be founded, are justice and fear. After the injuries we have done them, they cannot love us ...
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Is it a right or a duty in society to take care of their infant members in opposition to the will of the parent? How far does this right and duty extend? --to guard the life of the infant, his property, his instruction, his morals? The Roman father was supreme in all these: we draw a line, but where? --public sentiment does not seem to have traced it precisely... It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father... What is proposed... is to remove the objection of expense, by offering education gratis, and to strengthen parental excitement by the disfranchisement of his child while uneducated. Society has certainly a right to disavow him whom they offer, and are permitted to qualify for the duties of a citizen. If we do not force instruction, let us at least strengthen the motives to receive it when offered.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The concentrating [of powers] in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The happiness and prosperity of our citizens is the only legitimate object of government.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively. Of this, a cabal in the Senate of the United States has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislation, to protect themselves. I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
-- Thomas Jefferson (Questionable)		 
In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Our legislators are not sufficiently appraised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce 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 the right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third [party].  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		 
He [King George III] has erected a multitude of New Offices and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands].
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world´s believing him.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 

-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It had become an universal and almost uncontroverted position in the several States, that the purposes of society do not require a surrender of all our rights to our ordinary governors; that there are certain portions of right not necessary to enable them to carry on an effective government, and which experience has nevertheless proved they will be constantly encroaching on, if submitted to them; that there are also certain fences which experience has proved peculiarly efficacious against wrong, and rarely obstructive of right, which yet the governing powers have ever shown a disposition to weaken and remove. Of the first kind, for instance, is freedom of religion; of the second, trial by jury, habeas corpus laws, free presses.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction... I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity... is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
...Enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more.. .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, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people.
-- 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.... If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[T]he flames kindled on the Fourth of July 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The policy of American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. That government is best which governs least.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
You say that I have been dished up to you as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never worthy enough of notice to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will tell it to you. I am not a federalist. ... What I disapproved from the first moment also, was the want of a bill of rights, to guard liberty against the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government; that is to say, to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury, in all cases determinable by the laws of the land.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.
-- Thomas Jefferson (Questionable)		 
The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[The] Bank of the United States... is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution... An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.
-- Thomas Jefferson (False)		 
Convinced that the republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind, my prayers & efforts shall be cordially distributed to the support of that we have so happily established. It is indeed an animating thought that, while we are securing the rights of ourselves & our posterity, we are pointing out the way to struggling nations who wish, like us, to emerge from their tyrannies also. Heaven help their struggles, and lead them, as it has done us, triumphantly thro' them.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislature to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we counternance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Parties are... censors of the conduct of each other, and useful watchmen for the public. Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise, depository of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, ...Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still, and pursue the same object.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction.
-- Thomas Jefferson (False)		 
It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate therefore the gold from the dross; restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of his doctrines led me to try to sift them apart.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
And, finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
To lay taxes to provide for the general welfare of the United States, that is to say, 'to lay taxes for the purpose of providing for the general welfare.' For the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
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 to rest on inference.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive. It places the governors indeed more at their ease at the expense of the people. The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given much more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in thirteen States in the course of eleven years is but one for each State in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of the government prevent insurrections. In England, where the hand of power is heavier than with us, there are seldom half a dozen years without an insurrection. In France, where it is still heavier but less despotic, as Montesquieu supposes, than in some other countries and where there are always two or three hundred thousand men ready to crush insurrections, there have been three in the course of the three years I have been here, in every one of which greater numbers were engaged than in Massachusetts.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Money and not morality is the principle of commerce and commercial nations.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Delay is preferable to error.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Laws provide against injury from others, but not from ourselves.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation... to a continuance in union... I have no hesitation in saying, 'let us separate.'
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
-- 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		 
Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected – these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Every species of government has its specific principles. Ours perhaps are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
[N]othing can be more opposed [to American principles] than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greater number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogenous, incoherent, distracted mass.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
During the course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science are deeply to be regretted, inasmuch as they tend to lessen its usefulness and to sap its safety.
-- Thomas Jefferson		 
Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government, a bureaucratic elite which believes our Constitution is outmoded.
-- Senator William Jenner		 
I want to make one thing clear. This war against our constitution is not being fought way off in Madagascar or in Mandalay. It is being fought here—in our schools, our colleges, our churches, our women’s clubs. It is being fought with our money, channeled through the State Department. It is being fought twenty-four hours a day—while we remain asleep. How many of you Senators know what the UN is doing to change the teaching of the children in your own home town? The UN is at work there, every day and night, changing the teachers, changing the teaching materials, changing the very words and tones—changing all the essential ideas which we imagine our schools are teaching to our young folks. How in the name of Heaven are we to sit here, approve these programs, appropriate our own people’s money—for such outrageous “orientation” of our own children, and of the men and women who teach our children, in this Nation’s schools?
-- William Jenner		 
It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
-- Jerome K. Jerome		 
Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
Put up again thy sword into its place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For everyone that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, 'It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.'
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, 'It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.'
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
-- Jesus of Nazareth		 
What you don't see with your eyes, don't witness with your mouth.
-- Jewish Proverb		 
Truth is the safest lie.
-- Jewish Proverb		 
[I]t’s an unfortunate reality in many of the journalistic environments we exist today. We can’t criticize certain people, or dig into certain stories, or follow our noses on the trail of corruption if it means upsetting our publishers, sponsors, and donors.
-- Zaid Jilani		 
ThinkProgress national security bloggers were called into a meeting with CAP senior staff and basically berated for opposing the Afghan war and creating daylight between us and Obama. It confused me a lot because on the one hand, CAP was advertising to donors that it opposed the Afghan war -- in our “Progressive Party,” the annual fundraising party we do with both Big Name Progressive Donors and corporate lobbyists (in the same room!) we even advertised that we wanted to end the war in Afghanistan. But what that meeting with CAP senior staff showed me was that they viewed being closer to Obama and aligning with his policy as more important than demonstrating progressive principle, if that meant breaking with Obama.
-- Zaid Jilani		 
Outside of the Constitution we have no legal authority more than private citizens, and within it we have only so much as that instrument gives us. This broad principle limits all our functions and applies to all subjects.
-- Andrew Johnson		 
I have never met a more dedicated bunch of people than I did working in the union, at every level. The work is difficult and demanding, and very few people would do it if they didn’t believe in its righteousness. However, the conviction that you know what’s best insulates you against reflecting morally on your own actions and it teaches you to begin assessing morality in terms of either the ends justifying the means, or even worse, of mere good intention justifying those means.
-- Ben Johnson		 
We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men.
-- Gerald W. Johnson		 
The first casualty when war comes is Truth.
-- Hiram Johnson		 
The first casualty when war comes is truth.
-- Hiram W. Johnson		 
Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.
-- James Weldon Johnson		 
Never ruin an apology with an excuse.
-- Kimberly Johnson		 
I believe that one of the great problems for us as individuals is the depression and the tension resulting from existence in a world which is increasingly less pleasing to the eye.
-- Lady Bird Johnson		 
Free speech, free press, free religion, the right of free assembly, yes, the right of petition... well, they are still radical ideas.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson		 
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson		 
Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson		 
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson		 
Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private.
-- Lyndon B. Johnson		 
China, Cuba, countries where the only freedoms are those bestowed on a whim by the state -- these countries jail their kids for burning the flag. We do not. America was created around dissent. Our freedom is founded upon the right to make known our opinion without threat of government interdiction -- Old Glory is the ultimate, tangible expression of this national belief.
-- Marvin Johnson		 
Patriotism and respect are earned through the substance and values of a nation, not by its physical symbols. By making the American flag untouchable, Congress would be sending the message that approval of our nation is an obligation not a choice.
-- Marvin Johnson		 
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance.
-- Paul Bede Johnson		 
If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Naziism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.
-- Paul Bede Johnson		 
Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye.
-- Paul Bede Johnson		 
If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.
-- Paul Bede Johnson		 
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.
-- Paul Bede Johnson		 
Throughout history, the attachment of even the humblest people to their freedom…has come as an unpleasant shock to condescending ideologues.
-- Paul Bede Johnson		 
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.
-- Paul Bede Johnson		 
They who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
In order that all men might be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
They make a rout about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
Among the innumerable mortifications which waylay human arrogance on every side may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still, as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
Courage is the first of all the virtues because if you haven't courage, you may not have the opportunity to use any of the others.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man’s conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
Knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they live like men.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
There is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth. It is apparent that men can be social beings no longer than they believe each other. When speech is employed only as the vehicle of falsehood, every man must disunite himself from others, inhabit his own cave and seek prey only for himself.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intelligence.
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson		 
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
-- Samuel Johnson		 
Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.
-- Samuel Johnson		 
The people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them.
-- Zachariah Johnson		 
The issue isn't gun control but state control -- obtuse and arbitrary state control, state control run amok. ... Forget guns. If Dr. Hudson, Mr. Turnbull, Dr. Gingrich and others end up in jail it won't be for their guns but our liberties.
-- George Jonas		 
[Censors are] people with secret attractions to various temptations... They are defending themselves under the pretext of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weaknesses.
-- Ernest Jones		 
Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.
-- Howard Mumford Jones		 
An honorable Peace is and always was my first wish! I can take no delight in the effusion of human Blood; but, if this War should continue, I wish to have the most active part in it.
-- John Paul Jones		 
Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.
-- David Starr Jordan		 
There seemed to be no lengths to which some American officials would not go in aiding Russia to master the secret of nuclear fission.
-- Major George Racey Jordan		 
Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself -- and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.
-- Chief Joseph		 
I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian... we can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself.
-- Chief Joseph		 
It does not require many words to speak the truth.
-- Chief Joseph		 
There are some acts of justice which corrupt those who perform them.
-- Joseph Joubert		 
People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote -- a very different thing.
-- Walter H. Judd		 
One should be suspicious of “love” as a political slogan. A government which purports to “love” its citizens invariably desires all the prerogatives of a lover: to share the loved one’s thoughts and keep him in bondage.
-- Eric Julber		 
Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.
-- Carl Jung		 
Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.
-- Carl Gustav Jung		 
A shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
-- Carl Gustav Jung		 
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
-- Carl Gustav Jung		 
Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.
-- Carl Gustav Jung		 
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
-- Carl Gustav Jung		 
The Liberty of the press is the Palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights of an Englishman.
-- Junius		 
It is not the disease, but the physician; it is the pernicious hand of government alone which can reduce a whole people to despair.
-- Junius		 
Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; for the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things -- bread and circuses.
-- Juvenal		 
Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth having.
-- Juvenal		 
Quis costodiet ipsos custodies? (Who will watch the watchers?)
-- Juvenal		 
Who will stand guard to the guards themselves?
-- Juvenal		 
It seems as if the Department [of Justice] sees the value of the Bill of Rights as no more than obstacles to be overcome.
-- Prof. Sanford H. Kadish		 
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
-- Franz Kafka		 
You are free and that is why you are lost.
-- Franz Kafka		 
It's often safer to be in chains than to be free.
-- Franz Kafka		 
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press 3.
-- Alice Kahn		 
The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write.
-- David Kahn		 
As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends. Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin-brother of tyranny.
-- Otto Hermann Kahn		 
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied. Liberty is not foolproof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the practical and attainable, and of the fact that there are laws of nature which are beyond our power to change.
-- Otto Hermann Kahn		 
The deadliest foe of democracy is not autocracy but liberty frenzied.
-- Otto Hermann Kahn		 
Persecution, whenever it occurs, establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor, not the truth and worth of his belief.
-- H. M. Kallen		 
It is a paradox of modern life that speech, although highly prized, enjoys its great protection in part because it is so often of no concern to anyone. To an alarming degree, tolerance depends not on principle, but on indifference.
-- Harry Kalven, Jr.		 
Seditious libel is the doctrine that flourished in England during and after the Star Chamber. It is the hallmark of closed societies throughout the world. Under it criticism of government is viewed as defamation and punished as a crime.
-- Harry Kalven, Jr.		 
The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
War itself requires no special motive but appears to be engrafted on human nature; it passes even for something noble, to which the love of glory impels men quite apart from any selfish urges. Thus among the American savages, just as much as among those of Europe during the age of chivalry, military valor is held to be of great worth in itself, not only during war (which is natural) but in order that there should be war. Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, "War is an evil inasmuch as it produces more wicked men than it takes away." So much for the measures nature takes to lead the human race, considered as a class of animals, to her own end.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
The human heart refuses to believe in a universe without purpose.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
Freedom is alone the unoriginated birthright of man; it belongs to him by force of his humanity, and is in dependence on the will and coaction of every other, in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
Everyone may seek his own happiness in the way that seems good to himself, provided that he infringe not such freedom of others to strive after a similar end as is consistent with the freedom of all according to a possible general law.
-- Immanuel Kant		 
GATT represents the New World Order in trade.
-- Mickey Kantor		 
Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
-- Abraham Kaplan		 
Drug offenses ... may be regarded as the prototypes of non-victim crimes today. The private nature of the sale and use of these drugs has led the police to resort to methods of detection and surveillance that intrude upon our privacy, including illegal search, eavesdropping, and entrapment. Indeed, the successful prosecution of such cases often requires police infringement of the constitutional protections that safeguard the privacy of individuals.
-- John Kaplan		 
We simply do not catch a high enough percentage of users to make the law a real threat, although we do catch enough to seriously overburden our legal system.
-- John Kaplan		 
It is, therefore, a fact of law and of practical necessity that individuals are responsible for their own personal safety, and that of their loved ones. Police protection must be recognized for what it is: only an auxiliary general deterrent.
-- Peter Alan Kasler		 
Ironically, the only gun control in 19th century England was the policy forbidding police to have arms while on duty.
-- Don B. Kates, Jr.		 
Americans have an extraordinary love-hate relationship with the rich culture they’ve created. They buy, watch and read it even as they ban, block and condemn it.
-- Jon Katz		 
Simply according artistic works the same protection as nonartistic works may not be sufficient to protect creativity. After all, the very essence of artistic expression is invention and artists necessarily draw on their own experience. But if the rules of liability are unclear, artists will not be able to know how much disguise is sufficient to protect their claims from the claims of those who may see themselves in the portrayals.
-- Irving Kaufman		 
Professionalism implies knowledge based in evidence, not in authority. Such lines are blurred in the era of identity politics and the normalization of pseudo-disciplines such as Gender Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Fat Studies, Disability Studies, Chicano Studies and White Studies and Indigenous Studies, all of which are taught based on the “authority” of Marxism, and all of whose primary purpose is to demonize “oppressors” – the “patriarchy,” white “colonialists” and the U.S. in general – and to recruit activists for organized perpetuation of the identity grievance industry.
-- Barbara Kay		 
Monetary policy today is guided by little more than government fiat -- by the calculations, often mistaken economic theories, and whims of central bankers or, even worse, politicians. Under such a regime, inflation of three or four percent annually has come to be viewed as a stellar monetary performance. However, under a more sound monetary system -- i.e., a gold standard -- such increases in the general price level would be seen as wildly inflationary.
-- Raymond J. Keating		 
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
-- John Keats		 
In the long vista of the years to roll,\\ Let me not see my country's honor fade;\\ Oh! let me see our land retain its soul!\\ Her pride in Freedom, and not Freedom's shade.
-- John Keats		 
Beauty is truth, truth beauty," That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
-- John Keats		 
Any philosophy worth considering must attempt to account for the existence of evil in the world.
-- Elie Kedourie		 
My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time.
-- Garrison Keillor		 
You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion.
-- Garrison Keillor		 
As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs.
-- Sir Arthur Keith		 
The highest result of education is tolerance.
-- Helen Keller		 
Security is mostly superstition.
-- Helen Keller		 
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
-- Helen Keller		 
No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.
-- Helen Keller		 
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
-- Helen Keller		 
I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
-- Helen Keller		 
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
-- Helen Keller		 
To say "I have to" is to speak the language of compulsion, duty, authority -- the language of injunctions imposed on us from without. Objectivism is not a duty ethic, but an ethic of values, the ultimate value being one's own life and happiness. The language of values is "I want" and "I will": I want this, and I will do what it takes to get it.
-- David Kelley		 
Dividing the political positions into liberal versus conservative is itself a leading example of [an old conceptual framework that organizes the world into categories and stereotypes] shared by journalists and media activists alike. As a result, it has taken decades for libertarians in the United States to break through this conventional view of the political spectrum and gain recognition as a distinct point of view. Over and above any hostility journalists had to free-market views, there was no conceptual space within their conventional wisdom for a political philosophy that combined free markets and free minds.
-- David Kelley		 
The case for a free society rests on individualism. ... Every form of totalitarianism has sought control over the minds of individuals, and has understood that it must first undermine the individual’s confidence in the validity of his own faculties. Remember O’Brien’s speech to Winston Smith in Orwell’s '1984'
-- David Kelley		 
The US government devotes massive resources and much sophistication to killing in Afghanistan. Would that it would spend a little to realize that its policies are creating anger. . . . It costs about $1 million a year for a US soldier -- boots on the ground -- in Afghanistan. Imagine what good that money could do if spent to help the Afghan people. A governor in Afghanistan makes about $1,000 a year.
-- Kathy Kelly		 
We have met the enemy and he is us.
-- Walt Kelly		 
Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.
-- Jack Kemp		 
Democracy without morality is impossible.
-- Jack Kemp		 
But because many endeavor to get knowledge rather than to live well, they are often deceived and reap little or no benefit from their labor.
-- Thomas Kempis		 
Activate yourself to duty by remembering your position, who you are, and what you have obliged yourself to be.
-- Thomas Kempis		 
It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.
-- Sally Kempton		 
Integrity is the core of our character.
-- L. Lionel Kendrick		 
Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.
-- George F. Kennan		 
Popular revolt against a ruthless, experienced modern dictatorship, which enjoys a monopoly over weapons and communications, ... is simply not a possibility in the modern age.
-- George F. Kennan		 
The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.
-- George F. Kennan		 
The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is besides the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
Respondents maintain that prayer must be nonsectarian … and they fault the town for permitting guest chaplains to deliver prayers that ‘use overtly Christian terms’ or ‘invoke specifics of Christian theology.’ … An insistence on nonsectarian or ecumenical prayer as a single, fixed standard is not consistent with the tradition of legislative prayer. … The Congress that drafted the First Amendment would have been accustomed to invocations containing explicitly religious themes of the sort respondents find objectionable. One of the Senate’s first chaplains, the Rev. William White, gave prayers in a series that included the Lord’s Prayer, the Collect for Ash Wednesday, prayers for peace and grace, a general thanksgiving, St. Chrysostom’s Prayer, and a prayer seeking ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, &c …'
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
From the earliest days of the Nation, these invocations have been addressed to assemblies comprising many different creeds. … Our tradition assumes that adult citizens, firm in their own beliefs, can tolerate and perhaps appreciate a ceremonial prayer delivered by a person of a different faith.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
Respondents argue, in effect, that legislative prayer may be addressed only to a generic God. The law and the Court could not draw this line for each specific prayer or seek to require ministers to set aside their nuanced and deeply personal beliefs for vague and artificial ones. There is doubt, in any event, that consensus might be reached as to what qualifies as generic or nonsectarian.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
While these prayers vary in their degree of religiosity, they often seek peace for the Nation, wisdom for its lawmakers, and justice for its people, values that count as universal and that are embodied not only in religious traditions, but in our founding documents and laws. … The first prayer delivered to the Continental Congress by the Rev. Jacob Duché on Sept. 7, 1774, provides an example: ‘Be Thou present O God of Wisdom and direct the counsel of this Honorable Assembly; enable them to settle all things on the best and surest foundations; that the scene of blood may be speedily closed; that Order, Harmony, and Peace be effectually restored, and the Truth and Justice, Religion and Piety, prevail and flourish among the people. Preserve the health of their bodies, and the vigor of their minds, shower down on them, and the millions they here represent, such temporal Blessings as Thou seest expedient for them in this world, and crown them with everlasting Glory in the world to come. All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Saviour, Amen.
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
The decidedly Christian nature of these prayers must not be dismissed as the relic of a time when our Nation was less pluralistic than it is today. Congress continues to permit its appointed and visiting chaplains to express themselves in a religious idiom. … To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures … and the courts … to act as … censors of religious speech. … Government may not mandate a civic religion that stifles any but the most generic reference to the sacred any more than it may prescribe a religious orthodoxy …
-- Justice Anthony Kennedy		 
Academic freedom really means freedom of inquiry. To be able to probe according to one’s own interest, knowledge and conscience is the most important freedom the scholar has, and part of that process is to state its results.
-- Donald Kennedy		 
You've got to rattle your cage door. You've got to let them know that you're in there, and that you want out. Make noise. Cause trouble. You may not win right away, but you'll sure have a lot more fun.
-- Florynce Kennedy		 
Freedom is like taking a bath -- you have to keep doing it every day!
-- Florynce Kennedy		 
Big Governments make for small citizens.
-- James Ronald Kennedy and Walter Donald Kennedy		 
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy; or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve -- and I believe this can be done -- a budget surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
There is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget.... As the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues. Prosperity is the real way to balance our budget. By lowering tax rates, by increasing jobs and income, we can expand tax revenues and finally bring our budget into balance.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
And so, my fellow Americans: Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizen of this plight.
-- John F. Kennedy (Questionable)		 
If we cannot end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
... By calling attention to a well-regulated militia for the security of the Nation, and the right of each citizen to keep and bear arms, our founding fathers recognized the essentially civilian nature of our economy. Although it is extremely unlikely that the fear of governmental tyranny, which gave rise to the 2nd amendment, will ever be a major danger to our Nation, the amendment still remains an important declaration of our basic military-civilian relationship, in which every citizen must be ready to participate in the defense of his country. For that reason I believe the 2nd Amendment will always be important.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers -- and this is the basis of all human morality.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The quality of American life must keep pace with the quantity of American goods. This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We must use time as a tool, not as a crutch.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics but for our contributions to the human spirit.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Forgive, but never forget.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
But peace does not rest in the charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of all people. So let us not rest all our hopes on parchment and on paper, let us strive to build peace, a desire for peace, a willingness to work for peace in the hearts and minds of all of our people. I believe that we can. I believe the problems of human destiny are not beyond the reach of human beings.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
We need men who can dream of things that never were.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
...probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
-- John F. Kennedy		 
The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'
-- John F. Kennedy		 
As part of the conversation with student leaders, we talked about the concept of Zero Tolerance. While I appreciate the desire for such a policy, it is unachievable under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The challenge we all face is to find the balance between wanting to eliminate expressions of racism and bigotry and supporting the free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. If we value freedom of speech, we must acknowledge that some may find the expressions of others unwelcome, painful, or even, offensive. We can, however, speak out and condemn such expressions, and we can work to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment.
-- Mark Kennedy		 
At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man... is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society.
-- Robert F. Kennedy		 
If our constitution had followed the style of Saint Paul, the First Amendment might have concluded: “But the greatest of these is speech.” In the darkness of tyranny, this is the key to the sunlight. If it is granted, all doors open. If it is withheld, none.
-- Robert F. Kennedy		 
The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use -- of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public.
-- Robert F. Kennedy		 
The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.
-- Robert F. Kennedy		 
All of us will ultimately be judged on the effort we have contributed to building a new world order.
-- Robert F. Kennedy		 
What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.
-- Robert F. Kennedy		 
Absolute, arbitrary power over the lives, liberty and property of freemen exists nowhere in a republic, not even in the largest majority.
-- Kentucky Declaration of Rights - Art. I, Sec. 2		 
The Governor is hereby authorized to enlist, organize, maintain, equip, discipline and pay when called into active field service a volunteer state defense force other than the National Guard...
-- Kentucky Revised Statutes		 
But to be in conflict with the constitution, it is not essential that the act should contain a prohibition against bearing arms in every possible form—it is the right to bear arms in defence of the citizens and the state, that is secured by the constitution, and whatever restrains the full and complete exercise of that right, though not an entire destruction of it, is forbidden by the explicit language of the constitution. If, therefore, the act in question imposes any restraint on the right, immaterial what appellation may be given to the act, whether it be an act regulating the manner of bearing arms or any other, the consequence, in reference to the constitution, is precisely the same, and its collision with that instrument equally obvious. ... The right existed at the adoption of the constitution; it had then no limits short of the moral power of the citizens to exercise it, and it in fact consisted in nothing else but in the liberty of the citizens to bear arms. Diminish that liberty, therefore, and you necessarily restrain the right; ... For, in principle, there is no difference between a law prohibiting the wearing [of] concealed arms, and a law forbidding the wearing such as are exposed; and if the former is unconstitutional, the latter must be so likewise.
-- Kentucky Supreme Court		 
That this House considers that the continued issue of all the means of exchange -- be they coin, bank-notes or credit, largely passed on by cheques -- by private firms as an interest-bearing debt against the public should cease forthwith; that the Sovereign power and duty of issuing money in all forms should be returned to the Crown, then to be put into circulation free of all debt and interest obligations...
-- Captain Henry Kerby		 
The Founding Fathers of this great land had no difficulty whatsoever understanding the agenda of bankers, and they frequently referred to them and their kind as, quote, 'friends of paper money.' They hated the Bank of England, in particular, and felt that even were we successful in winning our independence from England and King George, we could never truly be a nation of freemen, unless we had an honest money system. Through ignorance, but moreover, because of apathy, a small, but wealthy, clique of power brokers have robbed us of our Rights and Liberties, and we are being raped of our wealth. We are paying the price for the near-comatose levels of complacency by our parents, and only God knows what might become of our children, should we not work diligently to shake this country from its slumber! Many a nation has lost its freedom at the end of a gun barrel, but here in America, we just decided to hand it over voluntarily. Worse yet, we paid for the tyranny and usurpation out of our own pockets with "voluntary" tax contributions and the use of a debt-laden fiat currency!
-- Peter Kershaw		 
Take what you can use and let the rest go by.
-- Ken Kesey		 
In truth, attempts to regulate the civilian possession of firearms have five political functions. They (1) increase citizen reliance on government and tolerance of increased police powers and abuse; (2) help prevent opposition to the government; (3) facilitate repressive action by government and its allies; (4) lessen the pressure for major or radical reform; and (5) can be selectively enforced against those perceived to be a threat to government.
-- Raymond G. Kessler		 
...you must take the problem as it is, and let it be what it wants to be.
-- Charles F. Kettering		 
Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference.
-- Charles F. Kettering		 
And there is the point exactly, we are all the time blaming difficulties on to something else. Our real trouble is that we are too soft to solve the problem.
-- Charles F. Kettering		 
My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.
-- Charles F. Kettering		 
Engineering is thus a combination of brains and material -- the more brains the less material.
-- Charles F. Kettering		 
Character is the accumulated confidence that individual men and women acquire from years of doing the right thing, over and over again, even when they don't feel like it. People with character understand that their lives are filled with events and choices that are significant, above all, not because of the short term success or failure of the search for money or position, but because the choices we make are actually making us into one kind of person, or another. Our life of choices is a life-long labor to make ourselves into a person who has begun to respond adequately to the awesome gift we received from God when He made us in His image.
-- Alan Keyes		 
The act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember that our whole way of life is predicated on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well.
-- Alan Keyes		 
...[A] prohibition on moral judgments against various sexual behaviors is a violation of the freedom, even of the religious liberty, of those who view such behavior as wrong. If we don't have a right to act according to our religious belief by forming judgments according to those beliefs about human conduct and behavior, then, exactly what does the free exercise of religion mean? Can the free exercise of religion really mean simply that I have the right to believe that God has ordained certain things to be right or wrong but that I can't act accordingly? Surely free exercise means the freedom to act according to belief. And, yet, if we are not allowed to act according to belief when it comes to fundamental moral precepts, then what will be the moral implications of religion? None at all. But if we accept an understanding of religious liberty that doesn't permit us to discriminate the wheat from the chaff in our own actions and those of others, haven't we in fact permitted the government to dictate to us a uniform approach to religion? And, isn't that dictation of uniformity in religion exactly what the First Amendment intended to forbid?
-- Alan Keyes		 
The difficulty lies not in the new ideas but in escaping from the old ones.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
When I change my mind I say so, what do you do?
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. … Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth -- he could at the same time and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprise of any quarter of the world -- he could secure forthwith, if he wished, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality.
-- John Maynard Keynes		 
A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them that which they possessed, to see those whom they cherished in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.
-- Genghis Khan		 
Words that enlighten are more precious than jewels.
-- Hazrat Inayat Khan		 
The moving finger writes; and having writ moves on. Nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
-- Omar Khayyam		 
Indeed the Idols I have loved so long,\\ have done my credit in this World much wrong;\\ have drowned my Glory in a shallow Cup,\\ and sold my Reputation for a Song.
-- Omar Khayyam		 
Society cannot leap into Communism from capitalism without going through a socialist stage of development.
-- Nikita Khrushchev		 
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
-- Nikita Khrushchev		 
We cannot expect the American People to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving them small doses of Socialism, until they awaken one day to find that they have Communism.
-- Nikita Khrushchev (Questionable)		 
Comrades!  We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.
-- Nikita Khrushchev		 
Comrades!  We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.
-- Nikita S. Khrushchev		 
Your children’s children will live under communism. You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept Communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you; We’ll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.
-- Nikita Khrushschev		 
The Rules for Liberty\\\\ 1) Don’t hurt people: Free people just want to be left alone, not hassled or harmed by someone else with an agenda or designs over their life and property.\\ 2) Don’t take people’s stuff: America’s founders fought to ensure property rights and our individual right to the fruits of our labors.\\ 3) Take responsibility: Liberty takes responsibility. Don’t sit around waiting for someone else to solve your problems.\\ 4) Work for it: For every action there is an equal reaction. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded.\\ 5) Mind your own business: Free people live and let live.\\ 6) Fight the power: Thanks to the Internet and the decentralization of knowledge, there are more opportunities than ever to take a stand against corrupt authority.
-- Matt Kibbe		 
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
-- Soren Kierkegaard		 
Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority.
-- Soren Kierkegaard		 
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.
-- Soren Kierkegaard		 
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
-- Soren Kierkegaard		 
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived-forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.
-- Soren Kierkegaard		 
Why did they devise censorship? To show a world which doesn’t exist, an ideal world, or what they envisaged as the ideal world. And we wanted to depict the world as it was.
-- Krzysztof Kieslowski		 
Education is unique among consumer products -- when it fails to work as advertised, it's the customer that gets labelled as defective.
-- Kevin Killion		 
Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.
-- Jamaica Kincaid		 
To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element -- learning.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
In our struggle against racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, I came to see at a very early stage that a synthesis of Gandhi's method of nonviolence and the Christian ethic of love is the best weapon available to Negroes for this struggle for freedom and human dignity. It may well be that the Gandhian approach will bring about a solution to the race problem in America. His spirit is a continual reminder to oppressed people that it is possible to resist evil and yet not resort to violence.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.' ... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society ... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.”
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust ... is in reality expressing the highest respect for law ... We will not obey your evil laws.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
I have a dream that one day ... the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws, but conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
It is precisely because education is the road to equality and citizenship, that it has been made more elusive for Negroes than many other rights. The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second class status. Therefore, as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning,\\ "My country, 'tis of thee,\\ sweet land of liberty,\\ of thee I sing.\\ Land where my fathers died,\\ land of the pilgrim's pride,\\ from every mountainside,\\let freedom ring."\\ And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.\\ So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.\\ Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.\\ Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!\\ Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!\\ Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!\\ But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!\\ Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!\\ Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi.\\ From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
There comes a time when a moral man can't obey a law which his conscience tells him is unjust.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue?
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
I firmly believe that the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent resistance is the only logical and moral approach to the solution of the race problem in the United States.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
The nation is sick; trouble is in the land, confusion all around...But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: 'We want to be free.'
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
The group consisting of mother, father and child is the main educational agency of mankind.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept,… I strongly disagreed with Communism’s ethical relativism... there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently, almost anything—force, violence, murder, lying—is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?\\ Expediency asks the question, is it politic?\\ Vanity asks the question, is it popular?\\ But conscience asks the question, is it right?\\ And there comes a time when one must take a position\\ that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular,\\ but one must take it because it is right.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
We must also go out and meet the enemy before he reaches our shores. We must defeat him before he attacks us, before our cities are laid to waste.
-- William Lyon Mackenzie King		 
Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nations laws. Usury, once in control, will wreck any nation. Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.
-- William Lyon Mackenzie King		 
All I kin say is when you finds yo'self wanderin' in a peach orchard, ya don't go lookin' for rutabagas.
-- Kingfish		 
There are two freedoms--the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where a man is free to do what he ought.
-- Charles Kingsley		 
A long and uniform sanction by law revisers and lawmakers, of a legislative assertion and exercise of power, is entitled to a great weight in construing an ambiguous or doubtful provision, but is entitled to no weight if the statute in question is in conflict with the plain meaning of the constitutional provision.
-- Kingsley v. Merril		 
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
-- Barbara Kingsolver		 
Although modern American capitalism had greatly reduced the gap through social reforms, there was still need for a better redistribution of wealth.
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.		 
Anything that keeps a politician humble is healthy for democracy.
-- Michael Kinsley		 
All we have of freedom--all we use or know-- This our fathers bought for us, long and long ago.
-- Rudyard Kipling		 
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
-- Rudyard Kipling		 
Politicians: Little Tin Gods on Wheels.
-- Rudyard Kipling		 
I hate this "crime doesn't pay" stuff. Crime in the U.S. is perhaps one of the biggest businesses in the world today.
-- Paul Kirk		 
The aim of any good constitution is to achieve in a society a high degree of political harmony, so that order and justice and freedom may be maintained.
-- Russell Kirk		 
There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes.
-- Russell Kirk		 
We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.
-- Jeane J. Kirkpatrick		 
NAFTA represents the single most creative step towards a New World Order.
-- Henry Kissinger		 
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
-- Henry Kissinger		 
It cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the most significant single component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change its perceptions.
-- Henry Kissinger		 
We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.
-- Henry Kissinger		 
Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.
-- Henry Kissinger		 
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.
-- Henry Kissinger		 
Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.
-- Henry Kissinger		 
Let us fashion together a new world order.
-- Henry Kissinger		 
Politically, true individualism means recognizing that one has a right to his own life and happiness. But it also means uniting with other citizens to preserve and defend the institutions that protect that right.
-- Shawn E. Klein		 
The foundation of individualism lies in one's moral right to pursue one's own happiness. This pursuit requires a large amount of independence, initiative, and self-responsibility. But true individualism entails cooperating with others through trade, which facilitates the pursuit of each party's happiness, and which is carried out not just on the level of goods but on the level of knowledge and friendship. Trade is essential for life; it provides one with many of the goods and values one needs. Creating an environment where trade flourishes is of great importance and great interest for the individualist.
-- Shawn E. Klein		 
When government will expropriate any wealth that people create, the present value of future output can actually be less than the value of the country's tangible resources. The power of predatory government to destroy wealth is truly awesome.
-- Arnold Kling		 
In a free market, consumer sovereignty and competition tend to create instability when sellers learn to game the system too well... In a technocratic system, it is more difficult for consumers to exercise countervailing power. Innovative competitors are often precluded by regulation. Suppliers tend to apply concentrated lobbying power to protect their interests, while the diffuse interests of the consumer are poorly represented in the political process. ... Centralized, regulated systems look good on paper, and they may be effective as they start. However, market systems learn faster, because competitive innovation prevents a market from getting captured by the incumbents who have learned how to game the system.
-- Arnold Kling		 
[A]fter 20 years on the bench, I have concluded that Federal drug laws are a disaster. It is time to get the Government out of drug enforcement. ... If the possession or distribution of drugs were no longer a Federal crime, other levels of government would face the choice of enforcement or ... decriminalizing. ... The variety, complexity and importance of these questions make it exceedingly clear that the Federal Government has no business being involved in any of them. What might be a hopeful solution in New York, could be a disaster in Idaho, and only State legislatures and city governments, not Congress, can pass laws tailored to local needs. ... It [Congress] should repeal all Federal laws that prohibit or regulate their distribution ...
-- Judge Whitman Knapp		 
After 20 years on the bench I have concluded that federal drug laws are a disaster. It is time to get the government out of drug enforcement.
-- Judge Whitman Knapp		 
Knowledge is more a matter of learning than of the exercise of absolute judgment. Learning requires time, and in time the situation dealt with, as well as the learner, undergoes change.
-- Frank H. Knight		 
Everything you read in the press is absolutely true. Except the rare event of which you have personal knowledge.
-- Erwin Knoll		 
Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain relatively free after the people have been disarmed, but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or existing where the people have personal arms.
-- Neal Knox		 
In their tendencies toward tolerance, openmindedness, faith in people and lack of authoritarianism, selfactualizers do appear to possess psychic strengths which allow them to work well in situations marked by a diversity of viewpoints.
-- Jeanne Knutson		 
Instead of fostering a system that enables people to help themselves, America is now saddled with a system that destroys value, raises costs, hinders innovation and relegates millions of citizens to a life of poverty, dependency and hopelessness. This is what happens when elected officials believe that people’s lives are better run by politicians and regulators than by the people themselves. Those in power fail to see that more government means less liberty, and liberty is the essence of what it means to be American. Love of liberty is the American ideal.
-- Charles Koch		 
A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens. The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.
-- Charles Koch		 
Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many business have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations and tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want.
-- Charles Koch		 
If somebody smokes a joint, we're gonna go in and bust them? We're gonna raid houses in case somebody has a banned substance? Confiscate their houses? My God, if people don't see that as an abuse of force, of too much government, then we're just not communicating.
-- Charles Koch		 
Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government. That’s why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles.
-- Charles Koch		 
Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs -- even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.
-- Charles Koch		 
Each person will have a registered number, without which he will not be allowed to buy or sell; and there will be one universal world church. Anyone who refuses to take part in this universal system will have no right to exist.
-- Dr. Kurt E. Koch		 
The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, The Trilateral Commission -- founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller -- and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens.
-- Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, PhD		 
Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
-- Arthur Koestler		 
It takes a very long time to learn that a courtroom is the last place in the world for learning the truth.
-- Alice Koller		 
I was put in this world to change it.
-- Kathe Kollwitz		 
The invaluable and the valueless, the noble and the tawdry, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, the good and the evil, are equally protected by the First and the Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantees of a free press and religious freedom.
-- Milton Konvitz		 
Persons who fit “drug courier profiles” may be detained and harassed by the police, although such profiles include getting off the plane early, late, or in the middle as an element of the profile. Infrared sensors spy into people’s homes, with no probable cause. Except in the home, the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause requirement has been mostly abolished by a “law and order” Supreme Court. Under forfeiture laws, billions of dollars of private property have been seized from persons who have never been charged, let alone convicted of any crime. Pre-trial detention, a gross contradiction of the presumption of innocence, has become routine. Citizens traveling on busses, on trains, or in private cars are liable to be pulled over and searched by police and drug-sniffed by police dogs for no reason at all. Urinalysis has become a routine condition of initial or continued employment, and the medical privacy of many persons taking lawful prescription medication has been compromised as a result. Stalinesque “Drug Abuse Resistance Education” programs in the schools encourage children to turn in their parents for illegal drug possession. Attractive young police officers pretend to be high school students, and pester socially awkward teenagers into selling them drugs. Punishment for crime has become grotesquely disproportionate to the offense, as teenagers in possession of $1,500 worth of LSD are sent to prison for longer terms than kidnappers and arsonists. America has a higher imprisonment rate than any other nation in the world, and yet violent criminals serve less and less time in prison as America’s rapidly expanding prison industry takes in more and more young people convicted of drug offenses. The United States Army is conducting domestic law enforcement operations in California and Oregon; the National Guard has been turned into a militarized drug police. Wiretapping has never been more common. Financial privacy has vanished as banks must report currency transactions; car dealers must report customers who buy with cash.
-- David B. Kopel		 
[T]he drug prohibition laws have led to wholesale destruction of civil liberties. The War on Drugs has now become a War on the Constitution, and the American people have become, in the eyes of their government, a society of suspects.
-- David B. Kopel		 
In the twentieth century, the United States government forced 100,000 United States citizens into concentration camps. In 1941, American citizens of Japanese descent were herded into concentration camps run by the United States government. Like the victims of other mass deportations, these Americans were allowed to retain only the property they could carry with them. Everything else—including family businesses built up over generations—had to be sold immediately at fire-sale prices or abandoned. The camps were “ringed with barbed wire fences and guard towers.” During the war, the federal government pushed Central and South American governments to round up persons of Japanese ancestry in those nations and have them shipped to the U.S. concentration camps. ... the incarceration of Japanese-Americans continued long after any plausible national security justification had vanished. ... what if the war had gone differently? What if a frustrated, angry America, continuing to lose a war in the Pacific, had been tempted to take revenge on the “enemy” that was, in the concentration camps, a safe target. Would killing all the Japanese be a potential policy option? In 1944, by which time America’s eventual victory in the war seemed assured, the Gallup Poll asked Americans, “What do you think we should do with Japan, as a country, after the war?” Thirteen percent of Americans chose the response “Kill all Japanese people.”
-- David B. Kopel		 
[I]f society acknowledges that handguns have significant defensive value and can help save the lives of police officers and security guards, how can society deny that handguns can also help save the lives of other people?
-- David B. Kopel		 
A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure regime change even before he took power in January 2001… It has been called a secret blueprint for US global domination. … A small group of people with a plan to remove Saddam Hussein long before George W. Bush was elected president. … And 9/11 provided the opportunity to set it in motion. Not since Mein Kampf has a geopolitical punch been so blatantly telegraphed years ahead of the blow.
-- Ted Koppel		 
The freedom to fail is vital if you’re going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success.
-- Michael Korda		 
Liberty requires restraints on popularly-elected leaders, as well as from minorities, so that the individual is protected from undue and arbitrary coercion by the state. These restraints are provided by a plurality of more or less equal and independent groups which check and balance one another's power.
-- William Kornhauser		 
The failure to instruct jurors on their power to nullify also raises constitutional concerns. The right to a jury actually exists as part of a constitutional framework designed to protect defendants from potential government abuse. The Sixth Amendment states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a ... public trial by an impartial jury. ...” The Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial is “fundamental to the American scheme of justice,’ acting as a safeguard against the government. This constitutional safeguard is achieved through the “participation of the community in determinations of guilt and by the application of the common sense of laymen who, as jurors, consider the case.”
-- Robert E. Korroch		 
The jury possesses a general veto power and may acquit when it has no sympathy for the Government’s case, no matter how overwhelming the evidence of guilt. A jury acquittal is final and unreviewable; a judge may not direct a jury to convict or vacate an acquittal, nor may a prosecutor appeal an acquittal on grounds of judicial error or erroneous jury determination.
-- Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Korroch		 
It seems now that the place where you see the most obvious censorship is on college campuses --- the precise place where you would expect to see the least.
-- Alan Charles Kors		 
Democracy is based on the principle of one person, one vote. The market functions on the principle of one dollar, one vote. Consequently, under conditions of unequal economic power, a society ruled by the market is a society ruled by those who have the most money—the antithesis of democracy.
-- Dr. David Korten		 
Thus corporations finally claimed the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens while being exempted from many of the responsibilities and liabilities of citizenship. Furthermore, in being guaranteed the same right to free speech as individual citizens, they achieved, in the words of Paul Hawken, 'precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent: domination of public thought and discourse.' The subsequent claim by corporations that they have the same right as any individual to influence the government in their own interest pits the individual citizen against the vast financial and communications resources of the corporation and mocks the constitutional intent that all citizens have an equal voice in the political debates surrounding important issues.
-- David C. Korten		 
God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.
-- Alfred Korzyybski		 
The cause of freedom is identified with the destinies of humanity, and in whatever part of the world it gains ground by and by, it will be a common gain to all those who desire it.
-- Louis Kossuth		 
Some police chiefs for years have warned that we are “militarizing” our nation’s police. “Smart bombs” are used to enter drug dens. Officers are clad in paramilitary garb including battle helmets. Armored “urban” assault vehicles are tactically utilized on city streets. Cops are trained in military tactics. You cannot train officers in such a manner and then expect them to behave like “Officer Friendly” .... The FBI is an investigatory agency. Originally, they weren’t even armed. Why are lawyers and accountants being transformed into G.I. Joes? When such occurs we come dangerously close to establishing a National Police Force, something not intended by the framers of the U.S. Constitution.
-- Police Chief James J. Kouri		 
There's a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is: "Beat it to death if it succeeds."
-- Ernie Kovacs		 
The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
-- Judge Alex Kozinski		 
[Y]ou wonder why anyone would make the mistake of calling it the Commerce Clause instead of the 'Hey, you -can-do-whatever-you-feel-like Clause?'
-- Judge Alex Kozinski		 
The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'
-- Jonathan Kozol		 
When governments use the judiciary to recover “damage,” the courts intrude on the regulatory and revenue responsibilities of legislatures. And when lawsuits based on tenuous legal theories impose high costs on defendants, due process gives way to a form of extortion, with public officials serving as bagmen for private contingency fee lawyers.
-- Michael I. Kraus		 
The Brady Bill's only effect will be to desensitize the public to regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.
-- Charles Krauthammer		 
The World is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can't agree on whose fairy tales to believe. In the end, Religion will kill us all.
-- Ed Krebs		 
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
-- Krishnamurti		 
This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.
-- Nicholas Kristof		 
Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose, Nothin' ain't worth nothin', but it's free.
-- Kris Kristofferson		 
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions -- it only guarantees equality of opportunity.
-- Irving Kristol		 
True individualists tend to be quite unobservant; it is the snob, the... sophisticate, the frightened conformist, who keeps a fascinated or worried eye on what is in the wind.
-- Louis Kronenberger		 
Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
-- Louis Kronenberger		 
The law is an adroit mixture of customs that are beneficial to society, and could be followed even if no law existed, and others that are of advantage to a ruling minority, but harmful to the masses of men, and can be enforced on them only by terror.
-- Peter Kropotkin		 
Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown.
-- Prince Peter Kropotkin		 
...instead it seems that business -- like weight loss -- is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility.
-- Paul Krugman		 
...as an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information.
-- Paul Krugman		 
Heterodox doctrines, in economics and elsewhere, often fail to get adequately discussed in their formative stages: both the intellectual and the political establishment tend to regard them as unworthy of notice. Meanwhile, those doctrines can seem compelling to large numbers of people (some of whom may have considerable political clout, large financial resources, or both). By the time it becomes apparent that such influential ideas demand serious attention after all, reasoned argument has become very difficult. People have become invested emotionally, politically, and financially in the doctrine; careers and even institutions have been built on it; and the proponents can no longer allow themselves to contemplate the possibility that they have taken a wrong turning.
-- Paul Krugman		 
The grand paradox of our society is this: we magnify man’s right but we minimize his capacities.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch		 
The central premise of constitutional governance is that 'We the people' have the power and the right to alter or abolish the form of government under which we live.
-- Raymond Ku		 
Those who have sought the most in gun control have sought the least in the punishment of criminals.
-- Robert J. Kukla		 
After years spent trying to deal with the effects of COINTELPRO, my rage at the FBI's almost unimaginable evil remains undiminished because I believe that it succeeded in many of its horrifying goals, given the deaths of Martin King, Malcolm X, and other sixties leaders. Since the FBI uses taxpayer dollars to fund its extreme and ridiculous investigations of anyone who expresses dissenting opinions, even resorting to crime -- including theft, encouragement to murder, subornation of perjury, and manipulation of the judicial process -- to achieve its ends, I have always advocated its disbanding.
-- William M. Kunstler		 
Free inquiry requires that we tolerate diversity of opinion and that we respect the right of individuals to express their beliefs, however unpopular they may be, without social or legal prohibition or fear of success.
-- Paul Kurtz		 
Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom.
-- Paul Kurtz		 
I would rather think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to come together and make sense.
-- Rabbi Harold Kushner		 
Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner.
-- Jim Kuypers		 
Farce, gross incompetence, and tragedy is the hallmark of big centralized government, wherever it develops. Big centralized government has developed in the United States year after year since the 1930s, and it has both solidified and metastasized since 9-11. Today, we live at the will and by the grace of a dystopian and grasping government. There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades. . . .

I believe our government -- outdated, unrestrained by the Constitution and soon to default on every debt it has taken on in our name -- cannot long endure. But unlike those who run and benefit from our modern American nationalism, corporatism and socialism, I do not fear average Americans seeking self-government, rule of law and liberty.

That's why on Sept. 11, I will not be celebrating America's undeclared wars on countries that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks 10 years ago. I will not be attending remembrances of victims of that day, because those remembrances refuse to count American liberty, rule of law and freedom of trade and movement uppermost on that list of the sacrificed. I will not attend any program offered by a religious or political organization that seeks to ride a federal government bandwagon to confirm some imperative of war against Islam halfway around the world, or that seeks to promote the false concept of a culture war as somehow God's intent for America.

On this 10-year anniversary, I intend to go about my business as usual, and say a prayer of gratitude for the small freedoms I have left. In the afternoon, I'll be in Charlottesville, Va., learning about local apprenticeship and crafts demonstrations. In the evening, I'll check the livestock and gather the eggs. I won't allow what I personally experienced that day in the Pentagon, nor the subsequent government drumbeats for war, waving the Sept. 11 banner, to diminish my awareness of the meaning of liberty.

The real battle for Americans today is a battle to reassert our independence from an overbearing and unsustainable state. Today, we can all celebrate that there are fundamental cracks in the federal state's veneer, and we can be grateful for the options we still have in our own lives to live free, to practice charity and faith, creativity and productivity and to rediscover our own power as individuals and communities.
-- Karen Kwiatkowski		 
One stumble is enough to deface the character of an honorable life.
-- Sir Roger L'Estrange		 
[Anacharsis] also said that he marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skilful in a thing contend together; but those who have no such skill act as judges of the contest.
-- Diogenes Laërtius		 
Consequently, any activity that is potentially harmful to others and requires certain demonstrated competence for its safe performance, is subject to regulation that is, it is theoretically desirable that we regulate it. ... In fact, I dare say that parenting is a paradigm of such activities since the potential for harm is great (both in the extent of harm any one person can suffer and in the number of people potentially harmed) and the need for competence is so evident. Consequently, there is good reason to believe that parents should be licensed.
-- Hugh LaFollette		 
Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected “radicals” without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail....we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity...
-- Robert M. Lafollette, Sr.		 
The principle of free speech is no new doctrine born of the Constitution of the United States. It is a heritage of English-speaking peoples, which has been won by incalculable sacrifice, and which they must preserve so long as they hope to live as free men.
-- Robert M. Lafollette, Sr.		 
And to kill time while awaiting death, I smoke slender cigarettes thumbing my nose to the gods.
-- Jules Laforgue		 
All stakeholders must participate in the gains and losses of any particular situation.
-- Christine Lagarde		 
The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.
-- R. D. Laing		 
In the 2004 presidential election campaign 92% of contributions of $1 million or more went to Democrats. Pro-Democratic 527s, meanwhile, spent more than twice as much as their GOP counterparts.
-- Jacob Laksin		 
Awareness of death is the very bedrock of the entire path. Until you have developed this awareness, all other practices are obstructed.
-- Dalai Lama		 
I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.
-- Charles Lamb		 
Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it.
-- Richard Lamm		 
Let me offer you, metaphorically, two magic wands that have sweeping powers to change society. With one wand you could wipe out all racism and discrimination from the hearts and minds of white America. The other wand you could wave across the ghettos and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning and ambition. ... I suggest that the best wand for society and for those who live in the ghettos and barrios would be the second wand.
-- Richard Lamm		 
Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.
-- Louis Lamour		 
Collectivism is a form of anthropomorphism. It attempts to see a group of individuals as having a single identity similar to a person. ... Collectivism demands that the group be more important than the individual. It requires the individual to sacrifice himself for the alleged good of the group.
-- Jeff Landauer		 
Altruism is a code of ethics which hold the welfare of others as the standard of 'good', and self-sacrifice as the only moral action. The unstated premise of the doctrine of altruism is that all relationships among men involve sacrifice. This leaves one with the false choice between maliciously exploiting the other person (forcing them to be sacrificed) or being 'moral' and offering oneself up as the sacrificial victim.
-- Jeff Landauer		 
Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.
-- Ann Landers		 
Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many bad laws.
-- Walter Savage Landor		 
Nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar.
-- Rose Wilder Lane		 
Anyone who says that economic security is a human right, has been too much babied. While he babbles, other men are risking and losing their lives to protect him. They are fighting the sea, fighting the land, fighting disease and insects and weather and space and time, for him, while he chatters that all men have a right to security and that some pagan god—Society, The State, The Government, The Commune—must give it to them. Let the fighting men stop fighting this inhuman earth for one hour, and he will learn how much security there is.
-- Rose Wilder Lane		 
Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.
-- Rose Wilder Lane		 
Gun control is really race control. People who embrace gun control are really racists in nature. All gun laws have been enacted to control certain classes of people, mainly black people, but the same laws used to control blacks are being used to disarm white people as well.
-- General Laney		 
Having so pledged myself, and having been elected to my senatorship upon such pledge, and not having been elected to create an organization to which we would give a promise, either express or implied, that it would have the authority to send our boys all over the Earth, I cannot support the Charter. I believe it is fraught with danger to the American people and to American institutions.
-- William Langer		 
What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
-- Edward Langley		 
People have often been willing to give up personal identity and join into a collective. Historically, that propensity has usually been very bad news. Collectives tend to be mean, to designate official enemies, to be violent, and to discourage creative, rigorous thought. Fascists, communists, religious cults, criminal 'families' — there has been no end to the varieties of human collectives, but it seems to me that these examples have quite a lot in common. I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.
-- Jaron Lanier		 
All free constitutions are formed with two views -- to deter the governed from crime, and the governors from tyranny.
-- John Lansing, Jr.		 
Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
With virtue and quietness one may conquer the world.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
The more rules and regulations, The more thieves and robbers there will be.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
In the highest antiquity, the people did not know that there were rulers. In the next age they loved them and praised them. In the next they feared them; in the next they despised them.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
The more laws and restrictions there are, the poorer people become.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
A government can be compared to our lungs. Our lungs are best when we don't realize they are helping us breathe. It is when we are constantly aware of our lungs that we know they have come down with an illness.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
Without law or compulsion, men would dwell in harmony.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
Good Government is not intrusive the people are hardly aware of it; the next best is felt yet loved; then comes that which is known and feared; the worst government is hated.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
The people suffer from famine because of the multitude of taxes consumed by their superiors. It is through this that they suffer famine.
-- Lao-Tzu		 
We've witnessed a fire sale of American liberties at bargain basement prices, in return for the false promise of more security... The America being designed right now won't resemble the America we've been defending... The danger isn't that Big Brother may storm the castle gates. The danger is that Americans don't realize that he is already inside the castle walls.
-- Wayne LaPierre		 
No victim of crime should be required to surrender his life, health, safety, personal dignity, or property to a criminal, nor should a victim be required to retreat in the face of an attack.
-- Wayne LaPierre		 
[O]ur greatest contributions to the cause of freedom and development overseas is not what we do over there, but what we do right here at home.
-- Frances Moore Lappé		 
Labor, in itself, is neither elevating or otherwise. It is the laborer's privilege to ennoble his work by the aim with which he undertakes it, and by the enthusiasm and faithfulness he puts into it.
-- Lucy Larcom		 
The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.
-- James Larkin		 
I hate it when they say, “He gave his life for his country.” Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honor and glory of their country. We kill them.
-- Admiral Gene LaRocque		 
Since independence in the fourteenth century, the Swiss have been required to keep and bear arms, and since 1515, have had a policy of armed neutrality. Its form of government is similar to the one set up by our Founders -- a weak central government exercising few, defined powers having to do mostly with external affairs and limited authority over internal matters at the canton (state) and local levels.
-- Benedict D. LaRosa		 
A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
-- Doug Larson		 
Every State is known by the rights it maintains.
-- Harold J. Laski		 
The only real security for social well-being is the free exercise of men’s minds.
-- Harold J. Laski		 
No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism.
-- Harold J. Laski		 
[C]ivilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain ... those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men.
-- Harold J. Laski		 
Dogma is a defensive reaction against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but doubt of which he is unaware.
-- Harold D. Lasswell		 
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
-- Late 16th Century Proverb		 
Principio Obstate (Resist from the beginning).
-- Latin Proverb		 
History is written by the victor.
-- Latin Proverb		 
Suum cuique [To each his own, to each according to his merits.]
-- Latin Proverb		 
If the wind will not serve, take to the oars.
-- Latin Proverb		 
I believe in my right to be wrong, and still more in my right to be right.
-- Owen Lattimore		 
There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom.
-- Andrew B. Law		 
Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains and always was.
-- D. H. Lawrence		 
Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.
-- D. H. Lawrence		 
I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?
-- D. H. Lawrence		 
Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.
-- D. H. Lawrence		 
I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy. You can only punish. I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches — its upholders as well as its defiers.
-- Jerome Lawrence		 
The Liberal Democrat remain steadfast in their belief that liberty must not be sacrificed on the altar of security and regrets the climate of fear that has been fostered by the approach of both Labour and the Conservatives to issues of domestic and international security. We believe that liberty, justice and the separation of powers are essential to achieving lasting security and that abandoning liberties, particularly in the face of unconventional threats from criminals and terrorists, will only serve to make Britain both less free and less secure.
-- Robin Lawrence		 
The high-handed bureaucratic excesses of the IRS are a national disgrace ... riding roughshod over the taxpayers and making a joke out of our rule of laws.
-- Paul Laxalt		 
It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.
-- Paul F. Lazarsfeld		 
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
-- Emma Lazarus		 
The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
-- Gustave Le Bon		 
I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.
-- John le Carré		 
The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all is the person who argues with him.
-- Stanislaw Jerszy Lec		 
One has to multiply thoughts to the point where there aren't enough policemen to control them.
-- Stanislaw Jerszy Lec		 
The right of property is the guardian of every other right, and to deprive the people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty.
-- Arthur Lee		 
A teacher is never a giver of truth -- he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. A good teacher is merely a catalyst.
-- Bruce Lee		 
Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one's potential.
-- Bruce Lee		 
Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.  The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
-- Harper Lee		 
The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
-- Harper Lee		 
It must never be forgotten...that the liberties of the people are not so safe under the gracious manner of government as by the limitation of power.
-- Richard Henry Lee		 
It is true, the yeomanry of the country possess the lands, the weight of property, possess arms, and are too strong a body of men to be openly offended—and, therefore, it is urged, they will take care of themselves, that men who shall govern will not dare pay any disrespect to their opinions. It is easily perceived, that if they have not their proper negative upon passing laws in congress, or on the passage of laws relative to taxes and armies, they may in twenty or thirty years be by means imperceptible to them, totally deprived of that boasted weight and strength: This may be done in great measure by congress.
-- Richard Henry Lee		 
[If Parliament] may take from me one shilling in the pound, what security have I for the other nineteen?
-- Richard Henry Lee		 
The constitution ought to secure a genuine militia and guard against a select militia. .... all regulations tending to render this general militia useless and defenseless, by establishing select corps of militia, or distinct bodies of military men, not having permanent interests and attachments to the community ought to be avoided.
-- Richard Henry Lee		 
To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.
-- Richard Henry Lee		 
Why then sir, why do we longer delay? Why still deliberate? Let this happy day give birth to an American Republic. Let her arise not to devastate and to conquer but to reestablish the reign of peace and law. The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us. She demands of us a living example of freedom that may exhibit a contrast in the felicity of the citizen to the ever-increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace, and the persecuted repose. If we are not this day wanting in our duty, the names of the American legislators of 1776 will be placed by posterity at the side of all of those whose memory has been and ever will be dear to virtuous men and good citizens.
-- Richard Henry Lee		 
A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves...and include all men capable of bearing arms.
-- Richard Henry Lee		 
Governor, if I had foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.
-- Robert E. Lee		 
[W]e made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers.
-- Robert E. Lee		 
...[T]here is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man's face and another behind his back.
-- Robert E. Lee		 
With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword...
-- Robert E. Lee		 
I have been up to see Congress and they do not seem to be able to do anything except to eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving.
-- Robert E. Lee		 
It is well that war is so terrible -- we should grow too fond of it.
-- Robert E. Lee		 
You must study to be frank with the world: frankness is the child of honesty and courage. Say just what you mean to do on every occasion, and take it for granted that you mean to do right.
-- Robert E. Lee		 
According to the Washington based Tax Foundation, the average American worked until May 7th of this year to earn enough money to pay local, state, and federal taxes for 1996. By comparison, Tax Freedom Day fell on January 31st in 1902; February 13th in 1930; March 8th in 1940; April 10th in 1952; April 16th in 1960; April 28th in 1972; May 1st in 1980; and May 6th last year.
-- Robert W. Lee		 
It is becoming increasingly apparent that many—arguably most—of the problems that plague our nation have been aggravated rather than alleviated by federal intervention. In one area after another, massive infusions of tax dollars have been squandered on false solutions which, when they fail to achieve their stated objectives, are cited to justify even more spending on other futile schemes that result in bigger government. Examples include programs and laws supposedly intended to reduce racial animosity which have instead heightened race-related tensions; welfare schemes that, rather than reducing poverty, have enticed millions of Americans to become dependent on Washington for their daily bread; federal funding (and control) of education, which has spawned a monumental education crisis; a “war” on drugs which has done little to curb drug traffic, but which has eroded many personal liberties; a health-care finance system that has deteriorated as government meddling and regulation have increased; and a masochistic immigration policy larded with false "solutions" that, while failing to stop the inflow of illegal aliens, have paved the way for further government intrusion into the lives of nearly all Americans.
-- Robert W. Lee		 
The statist objective, always, is to make as many persons as possible, as dependent as possible, on a government as big as possible.
-- Robert W. Lee		 
[M]y work, which I've done for a long time, was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy, but chiefly from a craving after knowledge, which I notice resides in me more than in most other men. And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.
-- Antonie van Leeuwenhoek		 
Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.
-- John Lehman		 
I practice journalism in accordance with the following guidelines: \\ • Do nothing I cannot defend. \\ • Do not distort, lie, slant or hype. \\ • Do not falsify facts or make up quotes. \\ • Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me.\\ • Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story. \\ • Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and good a person as I am. \\ • Assume the same about all people on whom I report. \\ • Assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty. \\ • Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story mandates otherwise. \\ • Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label it as such. \\ • Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously. \\ • Do not broadcast profanity or the end result of violence unless it is an integral and necessary part of the story and/or crucial to its understanding. \\ • Acknowledge that objectivity may be impossible but fairness never is. \\ • Journalists who are reckless with facts and reputations should be disciplined by their employers. \\ • My viewers have a right to know what principles guide my work and the process I use in their practice. \\ • I am not in the entertainment business.
-- Jim Lehrer		 
Censorship…is always and everywhere an evil. Censorship means the screening of material by an authority invested with power to ban that which it disapproves….And who is that paragon to whom we would be willing to entrust such authority?
-- Arthur Lelyveld		 
[R]evenues drive expenditures, not the inverse. ... tax evasion represents a net benefit to everybody ... A statue should be erected to the unknown tax evader.
-- Pierre Lemieux		 
Pity the poor opponents of the right to keep and bear arms! They must distrust just everybody except criminals and except the tyrant to whom they concede the armed monopoly of their protection.
-- Pierre Lemieux		 
Public Choice theory, if nothing else, has taught economists to consider the state as it is, not as it should be in a dream world: the state is a potential tyrant, not a benevolent God.
-- Pierre Lemieux		 
We do not have time to play at “oppositions” at “conferences.” We will keep our political opponents... whether open or disguised as “nonparty,” in prison.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
I don’t care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
One of the basic conditions for the victory of socialism is the arming of the workers (Communist) and the disarming of the bourgeoisie (the middle class).
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
Destroy the family, you destroy the country.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
It would be the greatest mistake, certainly, to think that concessions mean peace. Nothing of the kind. Concessions are nothing but a new form of war.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
Ideological talk and phrase mongering about political liberties should be disposed with; all that is just mere chatter and phrase mongering. We should get away from those phrases.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
...first ascertain exactly the position of the various capitalists, then control them, influence them by restricting or enlarging, facilitating or hindering their credits, and finally they can entirely determine their fate.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and all-national isolation, not only to bring the nations closer to each other, but also to merge them.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Questionable)		 
Hundreds of thousands of rouble notes are being issued daily by our treasury. This is done, not in order to fill the coffers of the State with practically worthless paper, but with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money as a means of payment. ... Experience has taught us it is impossible to root out the evils of capitalism merely by confiscation and expropriation… The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is therefore to flood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort. …[T]he great illusion of the value and power of money, on which the capitalist state is based will have been definitely destroyed.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (False)		 
The surest way to destroy a nation is to debauch its currency.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (False)		 
...the concentration of capital and the growth of their turnover is radically challenging the significance of the banks. Scattered capitalists are transformed into a single collective capitalist. When carrying the current accounts of a few capitalists, the banks, as it were, transact a purely technical and exclusively auxiliary operation. When, however, these operations grow to enormous dimensions we find that a handful of monopolists control all the operations, both commercial and industrial, of capitalist society. They can, by means of their banking connections.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
Only an armed people can be the real bulwark of popular liberty.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
They will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
Behind the October Revolution there are more influential personalities than the thinkers and executors of Marxism.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
The bourgeoisie is many times stronger than we. To give it the weapon of freedom of the press is to ease the enemy’s cause, to help the class enemy. We do not desire to end in suicide, so we will not do this.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
You have read and heard that communist theory—the science of communism created in the main by Marx, this doctrine of Marxism—has ceased to be the work of a single socialist of the nineteenth century, even though he was a genius, and that it has become the doctrine of millions and tens of millions of proletarians all over the world, who are applying it in their struggle against capitalism.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin		 
Did you hear that we're writing Iraq's new Constitution? Why not just give them ours? We're not using it anymore.
-- Jay Leno		 
We are told there is no cause to fear.  When we consider the great powers of Congress, there is great cause of alarm.  They can disarm the militia.  If they were armed, they would be a resource against great oppressions.  The laws of a great empire are difficult to be executed.  If the laws of the union were oppressive, they could not carry them into effect, if the people were possessed of the proper means of defence.
-- William Lenoir		 
In a world in which violent criminals are frequently armed with various deadly weapons, a public policy limiting the amount of force that may be exerted by an innocent victim in response to life-threatening aggression is puzzling. It is a curious law indeed which posits a society in which only criminals possess the means to kill. Where a violent criminal possesses a firearm, any attempt by his victim to defend himself or herself by inducing “temporary discomfort” in the criminal would likely result in serious injury to the victim or others, no matter what the extent of the defensive opportunity. One is not generally prevented from pulling the trigger of a gun because one is temporarily uncomfortable. This is especially so if the criminal is intent on hurting people. In such a situation, the only viable response by the victim entails the use of deadly force. ... It is perfectly rational for a victim who realizes that a criminal is going to attempt to kill him or her to resist that attempt with any amount of force available. It is, however, often safer, more effective, and perfectly legal to use deadly force instead.
-- John C. Lenzen		 
My concern is that past motivations for disarming blacks are really not so different from the motivations behind disarming law-abiding citizens today. In the last century, the rhetoric in support of such laws was that "they" (i.e. blacks) were too violent and too untrustworthy to be allowed weapons. Today, the same elitist rhetoric regards law-abiding Americans the same way, as children in need of guidance from the government.
-- John C. Lenzen		 
You can't run a society or cope with its problems if people are not held accountable for what they do.
-- John Leo		 
It is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of the right order, for a larger and higher organisation, to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies.
-- Pope Leo XIII		 
Books of apostates, heretics, schismatics, and all other writers defending heresy or schism or in any attacking the foundations of religion, are altogether prohibited.
-- Pope Leo XIII		 
The liberty of thinking and publishing whatsoever each one likes, without any hindrances, is not in itself an advantage over which society can wisely rejoice. On the contrary, it is the fountainhead and origin of many evils.
-- Pope Leo XIII		 
President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don't they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents.
-- Xavier Lerma		 
Only the mediocre are always at their best.
-- Alan Jay Lerner		 
In societies like the American and West European where the dynamics of energy come from freedom and where the climate and the whole ethos are those of freedom, censorship is bound to be at worst, stupid; at best, futile; and always, to some degree, inconsonant with the character of the society as a whole.
-- Max Lerner		 
The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.
-- Max Lerner		 
When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.
-- Max Lerner		 
The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press:\\ \\ - Concentrated Power of the Big Press. \\ - Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. \\ - Governmental control of the press. \\ - Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. \\ - Big Business mentality. \\ - Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. \\ - Social blindness.
-- Max Lerner		 
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others.
-- Doris Lessing		 
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one – but no one at all – can tell you what to read and when and how.
-- Doris Lessing		 
A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.
-- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing		 
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
-- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing		 
I once said cynically of a politician, 'He'll doublecross that bridge when he comes to it.'
-- Oscar Levant		 
The fault lies not with our technologies but with our systems.
-- Roger Levian		 
If we expected self-reliance of family groups, if we expected hardiness and resilience and initiative on the part of individuals, and if we rewarded initiative instead of dependence on government, we would not only ameliorate many of the family-related social problems we see at present, but we would also reduce our vulnerability to terrorism. People who are hardy, resilient, and self reliant are a lot harder to terrorize.
-- Bernard H. Levin		 
No truly sophisticated proponent of repression would be stupid enough to shatter the façade of democratic institutions.
-- Murray B. Levin		 
It seems foolhardy to assume that the armed state will necessarily be benevolent. The American political tradition is, for good or ill, based in large measure on a healthy mistrust of the state.
-- Sanford Levinson		 
The fundamental principle is this: No matter how worthwhile an end may be, if there is no constitutional authority to pursue it, then the federal government must step aside and leave the matter to the states or to private parties. The president and Congress can proceed only from constitutional authority, not from good intentions alone. If Congress thinks it necessary to expand its powers, the Framers crafted an amendment process for that purpose. But too often, rather than follow that process, Congress has disregarded the limits set by the Constitution and gutted our frontline defense against overweening federal government.
-- Robert A. Levy		 
Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death --- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists' puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man's opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Two wars necessitated vast curtailments of liberty, and we have grown, though grumblingly, accustomed to our chains. The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance. Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts.\\ \\ As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good -- anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.\\ \\ I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all. But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has 'the freeborn mind'. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer? Admittedly, when man was untamed, such liberty belonged only to the few. I know. Hence the horrible suspicion that our only choice is between societies with few freemen and societies with none.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers -- a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians -- a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Observe how the 'humane' attitude to crime could operate. If crimes are diseases, why should diseases be treated differently from crimes? And who but the experts can define disease? One school of psychology regards my religion as a neurosis. If this neurosis ever becomes inconvenient to Government, what is to prevent my being subjected to a compulsory 'cure'? It may be painful; treatments sometimes are. But it will be no use asking, 'What have I done to deserve this?' The Straightener will reply: 'But, my dear fellow, no one's blaming you. We no longer believe in retributive justice. We're healing you.'
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Not to be, but to seem, virtuous -- it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about 'Man taking charge of his own destiny'. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended -- civilizations are built up -- excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top, and then it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods? The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artifically kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway, the teachers -- or should I say nurses? -- will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
We must give full weight to Sir Charles's reminder that millions in the East are still half starved. To these my fears would seem very unimportant. A hungry man thinks about food, not freedom. We must give full weight to the claim that nothing but science, and science globally applied, and therefore unprecedented Government controls, can produce full bellies and medical care for the whole human race: nothing, in short, but a world Welfare State. It is a full admission of these truths which impresses upon me the extreme peril of humanity at present.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
For who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not even regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call 'disease' can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured. Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is life-long, even if it is fatal, that will be only a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
[Prosperity] knits a man to the world. He thinks he's 'finding his place in it,' while really it is finding its place in him.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species.
-- C. S. Lewis		 
The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?
-- C. S. Lewis		 
As a Christian I take it for granted that human history will some day end; and I am offering Omniscience no advice as to the best date for that consummation.
-- C. S. Lewis		 


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