Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 
Click on the name to open the full quote and the details about the quote's origin. Quotes are also grouped by Category and Author.  
 
We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people; we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.
-- Lewis Thomas		 
Dissent... is a right essential to any concept of the dignity and freedom of the individual; it is essential to the search for truth in a world wherein no authority is infallible.
-- Norman Thomas		 
The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.
-- Norman Thomas		 
After I asked him what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement.
-- Norman Thomas		 
All statutes are presumed constitutional and the party challenging the constitutionality of a statute has the burden of clearly establishing that it violates the constitution.
-- Justice Robert R. Thomas		 
Political censorship is necessarily based on fear of what will happen if those whose work is censored get their way, or if they are effecting in persuading a large number of readers to share their point of view. The nature of political censorship at any given time depends on the censor’s answer to the simple question, “What are you afraid of?”
-- Donald Thompson		 
When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered.
-- Dorothy Thompson		 
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
-- Dorothy Thompson		 
It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.
-- Dorothy Thompson		 
Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.
-- Dorothy Thompson		 
Jurors have found, again and again, and at critical moments, according to what is their sense of the rational and just. If their sense of justice has gone one way, and the case another, they have found “against the evidence,” ... the English common law rests upon a bargain between the Law and the people: The jury box is where the people come into the court: The judge watches them and the people watch back. A jury is the place where the bargain is struck. The jury attends in judgment, not only upon the accused, but also upon the justice and the humanity of the Law.
-- E. P. Thompson		 
After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.
-- Fred Thompson		 
It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.
-- Hunter S. Thompson		 
It is suggested that the solution lies in the United Nations Security Council. It is interesting to note that each solution it achieves invariably results either in the country involved going communist or vast territories being turned to communist-type socialism. The United Nations is the great Trojan horse within our gates, and we can hope for absolutely no help from that quarter, especially while it promotes and arranges finances, encouragement, and prestige to dissenting groups involved in so-called liberation movements of terrorist revolutionary groups.
-- J. Ralph Thompson		 
Nothing is plainer than that, if the principles of the church of Rome prevail here, our Constitution would fall. The two cannot exist together. They are in open and direct antagonism with the fundamental theory of our government and of all popular government everywhere.
-- Richard Thompson		 
Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Must a citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison ... the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Law never made men a whit more just.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause -- nor any charter of immunities and rights.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
To be awake is to be alive.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Others -- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders -- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few -- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men -- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part ...
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Trade and commerce, if they were not made of Indian rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Why does it [government] always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe... till we come to the hard bottom of rocks in place, which we can call reality.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe -- 'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which the will have.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
That government is best which governs least.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Things do not change, we change.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls -- the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the characters of individuals.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
I heartily accept the motto, that government is best which governs least ... Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, that government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it. After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience? -- in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
As for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
I make my own time. I make my own terms. I cannot see how God or Nature can ever get the start of me.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
A gun gives you the body, not the bird.
-- Henry David Thoreau		 
The creation of money exclusively as debt is the critical, destabilizing flaw in the American Economy.
-- Theodore R. Thoren		 
Before the creation of the welfare state, immigrants who came to this country were for the most part attracted by America’s reputation as a land of freedom and opportunity. Laws and customs that then prevailed required immigrants to carve out their individual destinies by their own labor, perseverance, intelligence, and determination.
-- James Thornton		 
It is natural that citizens of great and powerful nations see themselves, collectively speaking, as immortal and immune to the processes that have brought down other illustrious nations and peoples.
-- James Thornton		 
The new puritans have been highly successful. All of the preconditions for new prohibitions on alcohol and tobacco are in place. ... Indeed, the future agenda of the federal government has already been established to outlaw alcohol and tobacco in the near future. ... If current trends persist, America will be moving toward stricter prohibitions, greater restrictions, and more centralized control over consumption. This represents an erosion of liberty at its most fundamental level.
-- Mark Thornton		 
Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war.
-- Thucydides		 
For it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.
-- Thucydides		 
The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage.
-- Thucydides		 
As the world goes, right is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
-- Thucydides		 
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
-- James Thurber		 
Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and nobody to be kicked?
-- Lord Chancellor Thurlow		 
Power can rarely be wielded effectively over long periods of time unless it is perceived by the community in which it is exercised as a form of legitimate authority, not as mere coercive force.
-- Brian Tierney		 
I do not believe there are more than a very limited number of persons, perhaps a hundred who really know what is in the Constitution of the United States.
-- Dr. John J. Tigert		 
The first duty of love is to listen.
-- Paul Tillich		 
Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.
-- Paul Tillich		 
From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance.
-- Charles Tilly		 
At the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco, Nelson Rockefeller was in the forefront of the struggle to establish not only an American system of political and economic security but a new world order.
-- New York Times		 
When men get in the habit of helping themselves to the property of others, they cannot be easily cured of it.
-- New York Times		 
Nelson Rockefeller was in the forefront of the struggle to establish not only an American system of political and economic security but a new world order.
-- New York Times		 
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
-- Preamble To The United States Constitution		 
The things that are wrong with the country today are the sum total of all the things that are wrong with us as individuals.
-- Charles W. Tobey		 
Man’s drive for self-expression, which over the centuries has built his monuments, does not stay within its bounds; the creations which yesterday were detested and the obscene become the classics of today.
-- Matthew Tobriner		 
The Rothschild family is the head of the organization in which I entered in Colorado. All the Occult Brotherhoods are part of it. It is a Lucifer Organization to install his reign in the whole world. … Supposedly the Rothschilds have personal dealings with the Devil. I have personally been in his villa and have experienced it. And I know it is true.
-- John Todd		 
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
-- Alvin Toffler		 
One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.
-- Alvin Toffler		 
You may not be interested in war, but war is very interested in you.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning and cruelty.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
Governments need armies to protect them against their enslaved and oppressed subjects.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
The misapprehension springs from the fact that the learned jurists, deceiving themselves as well as others, depict in their books an ideal of government -- not as it really is, an assembly of men who oppress their fellow-citizens, but in accordance with the scientific postulate, as a body of men who act as the representatives of the rest of the nation. They have gone on repeating this to others so long that they have ended by believing it themselves, and they really seem to think that justice is one of the duties of governments. History, however, shows us that governments, as seen from the reign of Caesar to those of the two Napoleons and Prince Bismarck, are in their very essence a violation of justice; a man or a body of men having at command an army of trained soldiers, deluded creatures who are ready for any violence, and through whose agency they govern the State, will have no keen sense of the obligation of justice. Therefore governments will never consent to diminish the number of those well-trained and submissive servants, who constitute their power and influence.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
The strongest of all warriors are these two -- Time and Patience.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal -- that there is no human relation between master and slave.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
I know that most men -- not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems -- can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty -- conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
Hypocrisy is anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
The more that is given, the less people will work for themselves, and the less they work, the more their poverty will increase.
-- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi		 
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
-- Lily Tomlin		 
It is said, mostly by Libertarians, that ‘taxation is theft.’ Theft is too mild a word. Typically, a thief strikes only once, and doesn’t pretend that his robbery is legitimate. Taxation is actually slavery.
-- Rick Tompkins		 
[T]hroughout history the unarmed have been safe only as long as the armed (criminals or government agents) have allowed them to be safe. We should beware of any politician, bureaucrat, or intellectual who claims the Second Amendment is outdated, or that it does no more than guarantee the National guard’s right to bear arms. Many of these same people did their best to obstruct investigations of government wrongdoing at Ruby Ridge and Waco.
-- William R. Tonso		 
The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee		 
Civilization is a movement, not a condition; it is a voyage, not a harbor.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee		 
The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee		 
An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee		 
We differ from Tory Socialism in so far as we are in favour, not of paternal, but of fraternal government, and we differ from Continental Socialism because we accept the principle of private property, and repudiate confiscation and violence. With Mazzini, we say the worst feature in Continental Socialism is its materialism. It is this indeed which utterly separates English Radical Socialists from Continental Socialists — our abhorrence and detestation of their materialistic ideal.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee		 
The Radical creed, as I understand it, is this: We have not abandoned our old belief in liberty, justice, and Self-help, but we say that under certain conditions the people cannot help themselves, and that then they should be helped by the State representing directly the whole people. In giving this State help, we make three conditions: first, the matter must be one of primary social importance; next, it must be proved to be practicable; thirdly, the State interference must not diminish self-reliance. Even if the chance should arise of removing a great social evil, nothing must be done to weaken those habits of individual self-reliance and voluntary association which have built up the greatness of the English people.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee		 
To a reluctant admission of the necessity for State action, we join a burning belief in duty, and a deep spiritual ideal of life. And we have more than an abstract belief in duty, we do not hesitate to unite the advocacy of social reform with an appeal to the various classes who compose society to perform those duties without which all social reform must be merely delusive.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee		 
Mr. Speaker, we are now in Chapter 11... Members of Congress are official trustees presiding over the greatest reorganization of any bankrupt entity in world history.
-- James A. Traficant, Jr.		 
Mr. Speaker, in 1848, Karl Marx said, a progressive income tax is needed to transfer wealth and power to the state. Thus, Marx's Communist Manifesto had as its major economic tenet a progressive income tax. Think about it, 1848 Karl Marx, Communism.... I say it is time to replace the progressive income tax with a national retail sales tax, and it is time to abolish the IRS, my colleagues. I yield back all the rules, regulations, fear, and intimidation of our current system.
-- James A. Traficant, Jr.		 
America is in trouble... not from without, but from within! The Central Government has become too powerful. Citizens fear the Government. This is wrong. This is dangerous! I know the Government covered-up and promulgated LIES about Waco, Ruby Ridge, Pan Am Flight 103, Hoffa, and J.F.K. The Government knew I was right when I called Janet Reno a traitor. Janet Reno sold us out when she refused to investigate a $10-million payoff to the Democratic Party from a general in the Red Chinese Army (no less!). Think about it! And the Government knew that I had known why Reno was forced to betray America! I’m proud that I tried to do something about it! Someday the truth will come out. (I hope China never attacks us!)
-- James A. Traficant, Jr.		 
A memory is the life past, no one can take from you, forever it lasts.
-- Verka Paunovska Trajcesica		 
Those prepared to give their lives in freedom’s cause, come over to me...
-- Col. William Barrett Travis		 
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court. The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.
-- Treason Clause		 
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen, and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
-- Treaty of Tripoli, 1796		 
It's the misfortune of all Countries, that they sometimes lie under a unhappy necessity to defend themselves by Arms against the ambition of their Governors, and to fight for what's their own. If those in government are heedless of reason, the people must patiently submit to Bondage, or stand upon their own Defence; which if they are enabled to do, they shall never be put upon it, but their Swords may grow rusty in their hands; for that Nation is surest to live in Peace, that is most capable of making War; and a Man that hath a Sword by his side, shall have least occasion to make use of it.
-- John Trenchard		 
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the blood of real civilization.
-- G. M. Trevelyan		 
It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way.
-- Laurence Tribe		 
[The Bill of Rights is] designed to protect individuals and minorities against the tyranny of the majority, but it's also designed to protect the people against bureaucracy, against the government.
-- Laurence Tribe		 
[I]f we won’t choose to pay the price of liberty, then by default we shall suffer the cost of servitude -- whether it be the iron chains of a tyrannical oligarchy or the regulatory chains of unelected, faceless bureaucrats. When we witness our neighbors abused by tyrants, will we skulk away and hope we’re not next? Or will we stand by them and challenge -- as freedom-loving Americans -- the tyranny of lawless leaders.
-- Phil Trieb		 
[I]f we won’t choose to pay the price of liberty, then by default we shall suffer the cost of servitude -- whether it be the iron chains of a tyrannical oligarchy or the regulatory chains of unelected, faceless bureaucrats. When we witness our neighbors abused by tyrants, will we skulk away and hope we’re not next? Or will we stand by them and challenge -- as freedom-loving Americans -- the tyranny of lawless leaders.
-- Phil Trieb		 
...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the Reichstag fire.
-- Srdja Trifkovic		 
It is a known fact that the policies of the government today, whether Republican or Democrat are closer to the 1932 platform of the Communist Party than they are to either of their own party platforms in that critical year.
-- Walter Trohan		 
If our generation happens to be too weak to establish Socialism over the earth, we will hand the spotless banner down to our children. The struggle which is in the offing transcends by far the importance of individuals, factions and parties. It is the struggle for the future of all mankind. It will be severe, it will be lengthy. Whoever seeks physical comfort and spiritual calm let him step aside. In time of reaction it is more convenient to lean on the bureaucracy than on the truth. But all those for whom the word ‘Socialism’ is not a hollow sound but the content of their moral life - forward! Neither threats nor persecutions nor violations can stop us! Be it even over our bleaching bones the future will triumph! We will blaze the trail for it. It will conquer! Under all the severe blows of fate, I shall be happy as in the best days of my youth; because, my friends, the highest human happiness is not the exploitation of the present but the preparation of the future.
-- Leon Trotsky		 
Religions are illogical primitive ignorance. There is nothing as ridiculous and tragic as a religious government.
-- Leon Trotsky		 
A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values.
-- Pierre Trudeau		 
As against the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, there has to be a visible hand of politicians whose objective is to have the kind of society that is caring and humane.
-- Pierre Trudeau		 
Obviously, the state's responsibility should be to legislate rules for a well-ordered society. It has no right or duty to creep into the bedrooms of the nation.
-- Pierre Trudeau		 
What is considered sinful in one of the great religions to which citizens belong isn't necessarily sinful in the others. Criminal law therefore cannot be based on the notion of sin; it is crimes that it must define.
-- Pierre Trudeau		 
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
Secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
When even one American -- who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
It's not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It's the hand that casts the ballot.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
You can't get rich in politics unless you're a crook.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilian control of the military.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
It's an old political trick: "If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em." But this time it won't work.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for the crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have.
-- Harry S. Truman		 
Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
-- Mao Tse-Tung		 
Every Communist must grasp the truth, 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.'  Our principle is that the [Communist] Party commands the gun and the gun will never be allowed to command the Party.
-- Mao Tse-tung		 
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
-- Mao Tse-Tung		 
I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves.
-- Harriet Tubman		 
We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them.
-- Benjamin R. Tucker		 
No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
-- Judge Gideon J. Tucker		 
No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.
-- Gideon J. Tucker		 
To secure their enjoyment, however, certain protections or barriers have been erected which serve to maintain inviolate the three primary rights of personal security, personal liberty, and private property. These may in America be said to be: 1. The bill of rights and written constitutions ...\\ 2. The rights of bearing arms -- which with us is not limited and restrained by an arbitrary system of game laws as in England, but is particularly enjoyed by every citizen, and is among his most valuable privileges, since it furnishes the means of resisting as a freeman ought, the inroads of usurpation.\\ 3. The right of applying to the courts of justice for the redress of injuries.
-- Henry St. George Tucker		 
Civil rights, as we may remember, are reducible to three primary heads; the right of personal security; the right of personal liberty; and the right of private property. In a state of slavery, the two last are wholly abolished, the person of the slave being at the absolute disposal of his master; and property, what he is incapable, in that state, either of acquiring, or holding, in his own use. Hence, it will appear how perfectly irreconcilable a state of slavery is to the principles of a democracy, which form the basis and foundation of our government.
-- St. George Tucker		 
This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. ... The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.
-- St. George Tucker		 
Let no Negroe or mulattoe be cabable of taking, holding, or exercising any public office, freehold, franchise or privilege. ... Nor of keeping, or bearing arms, unless authorized to do by some act of the general assembly, whose duration shall be limited to three years.
-- St. George Tucker		 
Whilst America hath been the land of promise to Europeans, and their descendants, it hath been the vale of death to millions of the wretched sons of Africa ... Whilst we were offering up vows at the shrine of Liberty ... whilst we swore irreconcilable hostility to her enemies ... whilst we adjured the God of Hosts to witness our resolution to live free or die ... we were imposing on our fellow men, who differ in complexion from us, a slavery, ten thousand times more cruel than the utmost extremity of those grievances and oppressions, of which we complained.
-- St. George Tucker		 
To the extent that these [New Deal policies] developed, they were tortured interpretations of a document [the Constitution] intended to prevent them.
-- Rexford Tugwell		 
Characteristically, however, the overthrow of the dictator simply means that there will be another dictator. ... the policies they follow will probably not be radically different. If we look around the world, we quickly realize that these policies will not be radically different from those that would be followed by a democracy either.
-- Gordon Tullock		 
Our system is changing and [Congress] is the one branch that must act if we are to reverse those changes. We are seeing the emergence of a different model of government, a model long-ago rejected by the framers. ... A dominant presidency has occurred with very little congressional opposition. Indeed, when President Obama pledged to circumvent Congress, he received rapturous applause from the very body that he was proposing to make practically irrelevant. Now many members are contesting the right of this institution to even be heard in federal court. ... This body is moving from self-loathing to self-destruction in a system that is in crisis. The president's pledge to effectively govern alone is alarming, and what is most alarming is his ability to fulfill that pledge. When a president can govern alone, he can become a government unto himself, which is precisely the danger the framers sought to avoid.
-- Jonathan Turley		 
Marijuana leads to homosexuality ... and therefore to AIDS.
-- Carlton Turner		 
History does not exist for us until and unless we dig it up, interpret it, and put it together. Then the past comes alive, or, more accurately, it is revealed for what it has always been - a part of the present.
-- Frederick W. Turner III		 
We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, '...we shouldn't have done that.' We must remember, my friends, that we have been given a wonderful cause. The cause of freedom! And you and I must be those who will walk with heads held high. We will say, 'We used methods that can stand the harsh scrutiny of history.'
-- Bishop Desmond Tutu		 
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
-- Bishop Desmond Tutu		 
Stability and peace in our land will not come from the barrel of a gun, because peace without justice is an impossibility.
-- Bishop Desmond Tutu		 
Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for.
-- Amos Tversky		 
There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.
-- Mark Twain		 
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
-- Mark Twain		 
How you can win the population for war: At first, the statesman will invent cheap lying, that impute the guilt of the attacked nation, and each person will be happy over this deceit, that calm the conscience. It will study it detailed and refuse to test arguments of the other opinion. So he will convince step for step even therefrom that the war is just and thank God, that he, after this process of grotesque even deceit, can sleep better.
-- Mark Twain		 
Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffers, not the state.
-- Mark Twain		 
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
-- Mark Twain		 
We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.
-- Mark Twain		 
When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory – must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

'O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.'

[After a pause.] Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.
-- Mark Twain

 
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
-- Mark Twain		 
No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the congress is in session.
-- Mark Twain		 
Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't.  You cannot shirk this and be a man.  To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may.
-- Mark Twain		 
If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?
-- Mark Twain		 
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
-- Mark Twain		 
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.
-- Mark Twain		 
Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
-- Mark Twain		 
In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.
-- Mark Twain		 
Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.
-- Mark Twain		 
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.
-- Mark Twain		 
Often, the surest way to convey information is to tell the strict truth.
-- Mark Twain		 
A classic is a book which people praise and don't read.
-- Mark Twain		 
Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay or interruption -- no, for the Lie, as Virtue, as Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains. My complaint, simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. ... If this finest of the fine art arts had everywhere received the attention, encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this club has devoted to it, I should not need to utter this lament, or cry a single tear. I do not say this to flatter. I say it in a spirit of just and appreciative recognition.
-- Mark Twain		 
Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
-- Mark Twain		 

-- Mark Twain		 
Congressman is the trivialist distinction for a full grown man.
-- Mark Twain		 
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
-- Mark Twain		 
Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
-- Mark Twain		 
Carlye said, A lie cannot live; it shows he did not know how to tell them.
-- Mark Twain		 
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
-- Mark Twain		 
It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.
-- Mark Twain		 
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
-- Mark Twain		 
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
-- Mark Twain		 
Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.
-- Mark Twain		 
... if it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary.
-- Mark Twain		 
The history of the race, and each individual's experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
-- Mark Twain		 
One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed in it. They have also believed the world was flat.
-- Mark Twain		 
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first.
-- Mark Twain		 
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
-- Mark Twain		 
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics.
-- Mark Twain		 
Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.
-- Mark Twain		 
I am aware that when even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition... (more)
-- Mark Twain		 
Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.
-- Mark Twain		 
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
-- Mark Twain		 
All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.
-- Mark Twain		 
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
-- Mark Twain		 
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
-- Mark Twain		 
Travel is lethal to prejudice.
-- Mark Twain		 
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
-- Mark Twain		 
My kind of loyalty was to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.
-- Mark Twain		 
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
-- Mark Twain		 
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
-- Mark Twain		 
The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.
-- Mark Twain		 
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
-- Mark Twain		 
Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.
-- Mark Twain		 
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
-- Mark Twain		 
Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.
-- Mark Twain		 
For in a Republic, who is "the country?" Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
-- Mark Twain		 
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
-- Mark Twain		 
I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars.
-- Mark Twain		 
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
-- Mark Twain		 
Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.
-- Mark Twain		 
Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
-- Mark Twain		 
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
-- Mark Twain		 
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
-- Mark Twain		 
Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty -- the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.
-- Mark Twain		 
Few things are more irritating than when someone who is wrong is also very effective in making his point.
-- Mark Twain		 
When in doubt, tell the truth.
-- Mark Twain		 
Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
-- Mark Twain		 
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
-- Mark Twain		 
Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to get rid of it.
-- Mark Twain		 
It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many people can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval.
-- Mark Twain		 
I reverently believe that the maker who made us all makes everything in New England, but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerks factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.
-- Mark Twain		 
The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
-- Mark Twain		 
[N]o country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.
-- Mark Twain		 
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
-- Mark Twain		 
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
-- Mark Twain		 
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
-- Mark Twain		 
If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.
-- Mark Twain		 
Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it.
-- Mark Twain		 
I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't.
-- Mark Twain		 
As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?
-- William Marcy Tweed		 
I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating.
-- William Marcy Tweed		 
According to the Taranto Principle, the press's failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left's bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans.
-- R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.		 
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
-- Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (Questionable)		 
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complaceny to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again into bondage.
-- Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (Questionable)		 
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.... The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again to bondage.
-- Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (Questionable)		 
When the leader is morally weak and his discipline not strict, when his instructions and guidance are not enlightened, when there are no consistent rules, neighboring rulers will take advantage of this.
-- Sun Tzu		 
In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close.
-- Sun Tzu		 
Those who excel in war first cultivate their own humanity and justice and maintain their laws and institutions. By these means they make their governments invincible.
-- Sun Tzu		 
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
-- Sun Tzu		 
All warfare is based on deception. There is no place where espionage is not used. Offer the enemy bait to lure him.
-- Sun Tzu		 
We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.
-- Stewart L. Udall		 
[The problem is]...small arms are spreading throughout society with little documentation, since they are frequently bought from private individuals.
-- UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice		 
The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found.
-- Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo		 
[The Clinton Administration] may find it useful to invoke the commitments made here [in the UN] to Americans as a lever to persuade the gun lobby.
-- Unidentified diplomat		 
I solemnly affirm to exercise in all loyalty, discretion and conscience ... in the interest of the United Nations ... and not to seek or accept instructions ... from any government or other authority external to the organization...
-- United Nations' Loyalty Oath		 
The age of nations must end... The governments of the nations have decided to order their separate sovereignties into one government to which they surrender their arms.
-- United Nations' World Constitution (False)		 
Everyone has the right…to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.
-- United Nations		 
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others, and in public or in private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
-- United Nations		 
No state shall emit bills of credit, make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts, coin money...
-- United States Constitution		 
No State shall... coin money; emit bills of credit; make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts...
-- United States Constitution		 
... [the 16th Amendment] conferred no new power of taxation... [and]... prohibited the ... power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged...
-- United States Supreme Court		 
The Constitution is a written instrument. As such it's meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted, it means now.
-- United States Supreme Court		 
...the intent of the lawmaker is to be found in the language that he has used.
-- United States Supreme Court		 
To lay with one hand the power of the government on the property of the citizen, and with the other to bestow it upon favored individuals to aid private enterprises and build up private fortunes, is nonetheless a robbery because it is done under the forms of law and is called taxation. This is not legislation. It is a decree under legislative forms.
-- United States Supreme Court		 
Because of what appears to be a lawful command on the surface, many Citizens, because of their respect for what appears to be law, are cunningly coerced into waiving their rights due to ignorance.
-- United States Supreme Court		 
Our tax system is based upon voluntary assessment and payment, not upon distraint.
-- United States Supreme Court		 
The Constitution prohibits any direct tax, unless in proportion to numbers as ascertained by the census..... [and] ... prohibits Congress from laying a direct tax on the revenue from property of the citizen without regard to state lines...
-- United States Supreme Court		 
... bank records are not the depositor's private papers and having given the information to the bank, the depositor has no legitimate expectation of continued privacy... Records of an individual's accounts with banks are not the individual's private papers protected against compulsory production by the 4th Amendment, but instead are the business records of the banks.
-- United States Supreme Court		 
It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of the liberties ... which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile.
-- United States v. Robel		 
Do not mistake for conspiracy and intrigue what can best be explained by stupidity and incompetence.
-- Unknown		 
The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The WILLINGNESS to learn is a choice.
-- Unknown		 
Letter to the President of the United States from an American Indian: 'Be careful with your immigration laws. We were careless with ours.'
-- Unknown		 
The slow man with integrity will ultimately catch the swift one who has none.
-- Unknown		 
The worst penalties are always imposed on those seeking to help the oppressed.
-- Unknown		 
Though most of the muck-rakers were moderate in temper and aim, a few of them were Socialists. Upton Sinclair ran unsuccessfully for office several times as a Socialist, and he nearly was elected governor of California in 1934, when he managed to win the Democratic nomination. Other Socialist muck-rakers include Charles Edward Russell, who ran for mayor of NYC on the Socialist ticket in 1913, and Gustavus Myers.
-- Unknown		 
There's a little truth to every 'just kidding'.
-- Unknown		 
Dawn: The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.
-- Unknown		 
War is the tool through which the remaining Constitutional restraints on government and rights of the people will be destroyed. War will be the gateway through which total statism in any of its forms (fascism, socialism, communism) will be imposed upon the United States. They will rally the people’s patriotism, and give the laws Orwellian sounding names like the “Patriot Acts”, and “Freedom Laws” and cries of “America First,” but these acts will be anti-patriotic, anti-freedom, and anti-American. At the core of all these activities will be one purpose -- to impose ever increasing control over the citizens, marching toward total statism. They will suspend due process and Constitutional restrictions proclaiming “extraordinary times” require extraordinary measures. At first they will only be used against a few select atrocious and most heinous individuals with unfamiliar appearance, customs and beliefs. Initially, it will simply be a matter of degree, but the precedent is now set. Extraordinary measures solely for extraordinary individuals, but slowly and then more rapidly the extraordinary will become the ordinary until such measures can apply to anyone. They will deride anyone who opposes these Orwellian acts as dangerously naïve, as pacifists, as isolationists, as unpatriotic, as sympathizing with “the enemy” whoever “the enemy” may be at the time, and as un-American. They will make war with vague, ever changing goals and objectives. They will make war on elusive, obscure enemies by proclaiming wars against “subversives” or “guerillas” or “militias” or “revolutionaries” or “aggressors” or “terrorists” or whatever ambiguous name they can imagine so that the “enemies” will always be elusive, never eliminated or fully defeated. There will always be more “enemies.” War will be perpetual, lasting years or even decades. War will be the final mechanism that destroys America from within; and the people will proudly cheer and defend and support the dismantling of their rights and destruction of their Constitutional Republic, all out of supposed “necessity” to support “the war.”
-- Unknown		 
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
-- Unknown		 
Never risk what you can't afford to lose.
-- Unknown		 
Democracy, by definition, is participatory. Without participation, there is no democracy; that’s why the U.S. doesn’t have one. To participate, one must be educated and interested. There you have it.
-- Unknown		 
On the surface of the world right now there is War and violence and things seem dark. But calmly and quietly, at the same time, Something else is happening underground. An inner revolution is taking place And certain individuals are being called to a higher light. It is a silent revolution. From the inside out. From the ground up. This is a Global operation. A Spiritual Conspiracy. There are sleeper cells in every nation on the planet. You won't see us on the TV. You won't read about us in the newspaper. You won't hear about us on the radio. We don't seek any glory. We don't wear any uniform. We come in all shapes and sizes, colors and styles. Most of us work anonymously. We are quietly working behind the scenes In every country and culture of the world Cities big and small, mountains and valleys, In farms and villages, tribes and remote islands. You could pass by one of us on the street And not even notice. We go undercover. We remain behind the scenes. It is of no concern to us who takes the final credit But simply that the work gets done. Occasionally we spot each other in the street. We give a quiet nod and continue on our way. During the day many of us pretend we have normal jobs But behind the false storefront at night Is where the real work takes place. Some call us the Conscious Army. We are slowly creating a new world With the power of our minds and hearts. We follow, with passion and joy Our orders come from the Central Spiritual Intelligence. We are dropping soft, secret love bombs when no one is looking Poems ~ Hugs ~ Music ~ Photography ~ Movies ~ Kind words ~ Smiles ~ Meditation and prayer ~ Dance ~ Social activism ~ Websites Blogs ~ Random acts of kindness... We each express ourselves in our own unique ways With our own unique gifts and talents. Be the change you want to see in the world. That is the motto that fills our hearts. We know it is the only way real transformation takes place. We know that quietly and humbly we have the Power of all the oceans combined. Our work is slow and meticulous Like the formation of mountains. It is not even visible at first glance. And yet with it entire tectonic plates Shall be moved in the centuries to come. Love is the new religion of the 21st century. You don't have to be a highly educated person Or have any exceptional knowledge to understand it. It comes from the intelligence of the heart Embedded in the timeless evolutionary pulse of all human beings. Be the change you want to see in the world. Nobody else can do it for you. We are now recruiting. Perhaps you will join us Or already have. All are welcome. The door is open.
-- Unknown		 
Time and attention are our scarcest commodities - use them wisely.
-- Unknown		 
There are three parties in Washington, D.C. . . . Republican, Democratic and Cocktail.
-- Unknown		 
Most non-Catholics know that the Catholic schools are rendering a greater service to our nation than the public schools in which subversive textbooks have been used, in which Communist-minded teachers have taught, and from whose classrooms Christ and even God Himself are barred.
-- Unknown		 
Integrity is what you do when no one is looking.
-- Unknown		 
Be more aware of your responsibilities than of your rights.
-- Unknown		 
Economic warfare spans political warfare and military warfare and supersedes both, which are merely tools in the hands of those who are the masters of economic systems. The public is systematically misled, almost hypnotically, to believe that no such hidden masters of economic systems actually exist, or could even possibly exist, and that all of the economic strife in the world today is strictly the result of unplanned human incompetence when, in fact, very deliberate economic warfare is being carried out. Populations struggle to find purely political or military solutions to their economic problems, or they are manipulated and duped into giving yet more economic control over to their masters, in the name of general prosperity, because they do not fully understand the real principles of economics and banking. The myth of their non-existence is what protects the hierarchies of the international money cults of the world and allows them to continue their constant rivalries against one another, and to maintain their existence at the dire cost of their subject populations.
-- Unknown		 
Of course you can trust the United States government. Just ask any Indian.
-- Unknown		 
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
-- Unknown		 
Cynic: A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
-- Unknown		 
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
-- Unknown		 
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
-- Unknown		 
We need a law that will allow a voter to sue a candidate for breach of promise.
-- Unknown		 
A library is an arsenal of liberty.
-- Unknown		 
Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.
-- Unknown		 
A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top.
-- Unknown		 
If you don't care where you are, then you ain't lost.
-- Unknown		 
If we keep on the way we're going, we're going to wind up where we're headed.
-- Unknown		 
No shade tree? Blame not the sun, but yourself.
-- Unknown		 
A liberal is someone too poor to be a capitalist and too rich to be a communist.
-- Unknown		 
Politicians are like diapers and need to be changed for the same reason.
-- Unknown		 
If you think talk is cheap, hire a lawyer.
-- Unknown		 
America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar, and use it up in two weeks.
-- Unknown		 
Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will.
-- Unknown		 
When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'
-- Unknown		 
Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
-- Unknown		 
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
-- Unknown		 
Truth fears no questions.
-- Unknown		 
Some people will not tolerate such emotional honesty in communication. They would rather defend their dishonesty on the grounds that it might hurt others. Therefore, having rationalized their phoniness into nobility, they settle for superficial relationships.
-- Unknown		 
Always tell the truth. Even if you have to make it up.
-- Unknown		 
Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.
-- Unknown		 
Always tell the truth. If you can't always tell the truth, don't lie.
-- Unknown		 
Beware of the half truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.
-- Unknown		 
A lie may take care of the present, but it has no future.
-- Unknown		 
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
-- John Updike		 
The Federal Government is the creature of the States. It is not a party to the Constitution, but the result of it the creation of that agreement which was made by the States as parties. It is a mere agent, entrusted with limited powers for certain specific objects; which powers and objects are enumerated in the Constitution. Shall the agent be permitted to judge the extent of its own powers, without reference to his constituent? To a certain extent, he is compelled to do this, in the very act of exercising them, but always in subordination to the authority by whom his powers were conferred. If this were not so, the result would be, that the agent would possess every power which the agent could confer, notwithstanding the plainest and most express terms of the grant. This would be against all principle and all reason. If such a rule would prevail in regard to government, a written constitution would be the idlest thing imaginable. It would afford no barrier against the usurpations of the government, and no security for the rights and liberties of the people. If then the Federal Government has no authority to judge, in the last resort, of the extent of its own powers, with what propriety can it be said that a single department of that government may do so? Nay. It is said that this department may not only judge for itself, but for the other departments also. This is an absurdity as pernicious as it is gross and palpable. If the judiciary may determine the powers of the Federal Government, it may pronounce them either less or more than they really are.
-- Abel Upshur		 
Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich.
-- Leon Uris		 
The principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.
-- US Agency for International Development		 
If a State refused to let religious groups use facilities open to others, then it would demonstrate not neutrality but hostility toward religion. The Establishment Clause does not license government to treat religion and those who teach or practice it … as subversive of American ideals.
-- US Supreme Court		 
Democracy, n.: A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic... negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Result is demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, [chaos].
-- U. S. Army Training Manual No. 2000-25		 
No state shall ... make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.
-- U. S. Constitution		 
The Congress shall have power: To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures;
-- U. S. Constitution		 
Series 1863-1934 U.S. Gold Certificate - This is to certify that there have been deposited in the treasury of The United States of America [denomination face value, i.e. Ten Dollars] in gold coin payable to the bearer on demand.
Series 1886-1963 U.S. Silver Certificate - This certifies that there is on deposit in the treasury of The United States of America [denomination face value, i.e. Ten Dollars] in silver payable to the bearer on demand.
Series 1913-1934 Federal Reserve Note - Redeemable in gold on demand at the United States Treasury or in gold or lawful money at any Federal Reserve Bank.
Series 1934-1963 Federal Reserve Note - This note is legal tender for all debts public and private and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury or at any Federal Reserve Bank.
Series 1963- Federal Reserve Note - This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.

-- U. S. Currency		 
The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable.
-- U. S. Privacy Study Commission		 
Mind Your Business
-- U. S. Treasury		 
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
-- U.S. Constitution		 
This Constitution... shall be the Supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby
-- U.S. Constitution Article VI		 
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.
-- U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Sec. 2		 
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.
-- U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8		 
All ...Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution as under the Confederation.
-- U.S. Constitution, Article VI		 
This Constitution, ...shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby
-- U.S. Constitution, Article VI		 
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
-- U.S. Constitution, Ninth Amendment		 
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.
-- U.S. Constitution, Second Amendment		 
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
-- U.S. Constitution, Tenth Amendment		 
The pages of history shine instances of the jury’s exercise of its prerogative to disregard uncontradicted evidence and instructions of the judge.
-- U.S. Court of Appeals District of Columbia		 
Jury lawlessness is the greatest corrective of law in its actual administration. The will of the state at large imposed on a reluctant community, the will of a majority imposed on a vigorous and determined minority, find the same obstacle in the local jury that formerly confronted kings and ministers.
-- U.S. Court of Appeals District of Columbia		 
[T]he jury, as the conscience of the community, must be permitted to look at more than logic.
-- U.S. Court of Appeals First Circuit		 
The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of it's prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge.
-- U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia		 
We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge, and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision.
-- U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Maryland		 
From now onwards the jury enters on a new phase of its history, and for the next three centuries it will exercise its power of veto on the use of the criminal law against political offenders who have succeeded in obtaining popular sympathy.
-- U.S. Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit		 
We [the U.S.] must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order . . . we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
-- U.S. Department of Defense Planning Guide for 1994-1999		 
The United States must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a pax-Americana.
-- U.S. Department of State		 
Oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.
-- U.S. State Department Memo, 1944		 
[The] purpose of a jury is to . . . make available the common sense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps over conditioned or biased response of a judge.
-- U.S. Supreme Court		 
Since it was first recognized in [the] Magna Carta, trial by jury has been a prized shield against oppression ....
-- U.S. Supreme Court		 
Congress may not abdicate or transfer to others its legitimate functions.
-- U.S. Supreme Court		 
[T]he jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact.
-- U.S. Supreme Court		 
Emitting bills of credit, or the creation of money by private corporations, is what is expressly forbidden by Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution.
-- U.S. Supreme Court (False)		 
In this country sovereignty resides in the people, and Congress can exercise no power which they have not, by their Constitution, entrusted to it: All else is withheld.
-- U.S. Supreme Court		 
It may not be amiss, here, Gentleman, to remind you of the good old rule, that on questions of fact, it is the province of the jury, on questions of law, it is the province of the court to decide. But it must be observed that by the same law, which recognizes this reasonable distribution of jurisdiction, you have nevertheless a right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy. ... For, as on the one hand, it is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumable, that the court are the best judges of law. But still both objects are lawfully, within your power of decision.
-- U.S. Supreme Court		 
The right of the people peacefully to assemble for lawful purposes existed long before the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. In fact, it is and always has been one of the attributes of a free government. It 'derives its source,' to use the language of Chief Justice Marshall, in 'Gibbons v Ogden,' 9 Wheat., 211, 'from those laws whose authority is acknowledged by civilized man throughout the world.' It is found wherever civilization exists. It was not... a right granted to the people by the Constitution... The second and tenth counts are equally defective. The right there specified is that of 'bearing arms for a lawful purpose.' This is not a right granted by the constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.
-- U.S. vs. Cruickshan		 
The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge...
-- U.S. vs. Dougherty		 
Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.
-- Paul Valéry		 
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
-- Paul Valéry		 
The world acquires value only through its extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent.
-- Paul Valéry		 
Just as there is a very short distance between the U.S. and Cuba, there is a very short distance between a democracy and a dictatorship where the government gets to decide what to do, how to think, and how to live. And sometimes your freedom is not taken away at gunpoint, but instead it is done one piece of paper at a time, one seemingly meaningless rule at a time, one small silencing at a time. Never allow the government – or anyone else – to tell you what you can or cannot believe or what you can and cannot say or what your conscience tells you to have to do or not do.
-- Armando Valladares		 
The difference between [people who take civil liberties seriously] and others ... is that such serious people begin with a constitutional understanding that declines to trivialize the Second Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment, just as they likewise decline to trivialize any other right expressly identified elsewhere in the Bill of Rights. It is difficult to see why they are less than entirely right in this unremarkable view. That it has taken the NRA to speak for them, with respect to the Second Amendment, moreover, is merely interesting -- perhaps far more as a comment on others, however, than on the NRA.
-- William Van Alstyne		 
The Second Amendment, like the First Amendment, is ... not mysterious. Nor is it equivocal. Least of all is it opaque. Rather, one may say, today it is simply unwelcome in any community that wants no one (save perhaps the police?) to keep or bear arms at all. But ... it is for them to seek repeal of this amendment (and so the repeal of its guarantee), in order to have their way. Or so the Constitution itself assuredly appears to require, if that is the way things are to be.
-- William Van Alstyne		 
Wisdom doesn't automatically come with old age. Nothing does - except wrinkles. It's true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.
-- Abigail Van Buren		 
I agree that marijuana laws are overdue for an overhaul. I also favor the medical use of marijuana -- if it's prescribed by a physician. I cannot understand why the federal government should interfere with the doctor-patient relationship, nor why it would ignore the will of a majority of voters who have legally approved such legislation.
-- Abigail Van Buren		 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.
-- Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut		 
An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure.
-- Mark Van Doren		 
To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in.
-- Mark Van Doren		 
Respect for the truth is an acquired taste.
-- Mark Van Doren		 
The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
-- Vincent van Gogh		 
Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession -- their ignorance.
-- Hendrik van Loon		 
Is it not ironical that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?
-- Royce Van Norman		 
The media can now wistfully reflect on their glory days of the 1970's when the majority of people actually bought into their bullshit.
-- Laura K. Van Onymous		 
Anyone who tells you that "It Can't Happen Here" is whistling past the graveyard of history. There is no 'house rule' that bars tyranny coming to America. History is replete with republics whose people grew complacent and descended into imperial butchery and chaos.
-- Mike Vanderboegh		 
Using the power of the law to ensure that the law abiding are at the mercy of the lawless is an act of barbarism beyond the realms of logic. The dreamers and fools who force us to endure the carnage should be on trial along with the criminals they are creating.The world is not made more civil by forcing the civilized to be the victims of the predators. How dare you, any of you, refuse good law abiding citizens the right to defend themselves in a country where there were 25,000 murders, 105,000 reported rapes, and 975,000 armed robberies LAST YEAR?
-- Lon VanOstran		 
The tragedy of the police state is that it always regards all opposition as a crime, and there are no degrees.
-- Robert Gilbert Vansittart		 
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
-- Bill Vaughan		 
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
-- Bill Vaughan		 
I support people having a gun in public full stop, not just in your home. We don't have the right to bear arms because of burglars; we have the right to bear arms to resist the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government. It's not about duck hunting; it's about the ability of the individual. It's the same reason we have freedom of speech.
-- Vince Vaughn		 
Productive, private citizens in outlying regions of our nation and states are financially burdened to pay for a parasite public economy of lawmakers, lobbyists, contractors, and bureaucrats in the political centers.
-- Richard K. Vedder		 
Government cannot be your parent.
-- Jesse Ventura		 
The prohibition of drugs causes crime. You don’t have to legalize, just decriminalize it.
-- Jesse Ventura		 
There’s too many laws altogether.
-- Jesse Ventura		 
You want to know my definition of gun control? Being able to stand at 25 meters and put two rounds in the same hole. That’s gun control.
-- Jesse Ventura		 
That frequent recurrence to fundamental principles, and a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, industry and frugality, are absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty, and keep government free. The people ought, therefore, to pay particular attention to these points, in the choice of officers and representatives, and have a right to exact a due and constant regard to them, from their legislators and magistrates, in the making and executing such laws as are necessary for the good government of the State.
-- Vermont Declaration of Rights		 
The soul of our country needs to be awakened... When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders.
-- Veterans Fast for Life		 
Whereas it has been proposed that the United States of America become a part of a world federal government; and ... this program...would entail the surrender of our national sovereignty and...bring into being a form of government whose authority would supercede that of the Constitution of The United States Government; and ...institute a system of laws where-by American citizens could be tried by aliens in controversion of the provisions of the Constitution of the United States; and ...the Veterans of Foreign Wars is composed solely of men who have worn the uniform of the United States on foreign shores and in hostile waters in time of war and from their personal experiences are familiar with the traditions and operations of other countries; and ...many of our comrades rest forever in foreign soil and their sacrifices were made to retain the dignity and sovereignty of the United States of America: Now therefore, be it Resolved by the Fiftieth Annual Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, That we hereby declare that we are unalterably opposed to any program which would entail the surrender of any part of the sovereignty of the United States of America in favor of a world government...
-- Veterans of Foreign Wars		 
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent.
-- Gore Vidal		 
When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the [many] believe almost anything you want, and you can guide them.
-- Gore Vidal		 
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, and that's good enough.
-- Dr. Edwin Vieira		 
Democracy, though slowly attained and never by revolutionary jumps, is the best government on earth when it tries to make all its citizens aristocrats. But not when it guillotines whoever is individual, superior, or just different.
-- Peter Viereck		 
The first duty of government is to protect the citizen from assault. Unless it does this, all the civil rights and civil liberties in the world aren't worth a dime.
-- Richard A. Viguerie		 
The basis of the First Amendment is the hypothesis that speech can rebut speech, propaganda will answer propaganda, free debate of ideas will result in the wisest governmental policies.
-- Frederick M. Vinson		 
A man without religion is like a fish without a bicycle.
-- Vique's Law		 
Yield not to evils, but attack all the more boldly.
-- Virgil		 
Had the states been despoiled of their sovereignty by the generality of the preamble, and had the Federal Government been endowed with whatever they should judge to be instrumental towards the union, justice, tranquility, common defence, general welfare, and the preservation of liberty, nothing could have been more frivolous than an enumeration of powers.
-- Virginia’s General Assembly		 
The rights enumerated in this Bill of Rights shall not be construed to limit other rights of the people not therein expressed.
-- Virginia Declaration of Rights		 
That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love and charity towards each other.
-- Virginia Declaration of Rights		 
[T]his Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the Federal Government, as resulting from the compact, to which the States are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting the compact as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the States who are parties thereto, have the right, and are duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.
-- Virginia Resolution of 1798		 
The rights of human beings cannot be considered outside the perogatives of governments, and the very understanding of human rights is a governmental concept.
-- Andrei Vishinsky		 
It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. [I]f the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with ‘free banking.’ The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy.
-- Paul Volcker		 
It is a sobering fact that the prominence of central banks in this century has coincided with a general tendency towards more inflation, not less. [I]f the overriding objective is price stability, we did better with the nineteenth-century gold standard and passive central banks, with currency boards, or even with 'free banking.' The truly unique power of a central bank, after all, is the power to create money, and ultimately the power to create is the power to destroy.
-- Paul Volcker		 
Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value -- zero.
-- Voltaire		 
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
-- Voltaire		 
I may not agree with what you say, but to the death I will defend your right to say it.
-- Voltaire (False)		 
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
-- Voltaire		 
Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities!
-- Voltaire		 
Let the laws be clear, uniform and precise; to interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them.
-- Voltaire		 
The superfluous is very necessary.
-- Voltaire		 
The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of citizens to give to the other.
-- Voltaire		 
It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships, that they give credibility to the opinions they attack.
-- Voltaire		 
What is not in nature can never be true.
-- Voltaire		 
All men have equal rights to liberty, to their property, and to the protection of the laws.
-- Voltaire		 
In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.
-- Voltaire		 
The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything.
-- Voltaire		 
To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
-- Voltaire		 
Liberty is not and cannot be anything but the power of doing what we will.
-- Voltaire		 
It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.
-- Voltaire		 
Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.
-- Voltaire		 
Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others to persecute those who do reason.
-- Voltaire		 
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
-- Voltaire		 
We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk and hazard.
-- Voltaire		 
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
-- Voltaire		 
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
-- Voltaire		 
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
-- Voltaire		 
Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.
-- Voltaire		 
Your book is dedicated by the soundest reason. You had better get out of France as quickly as you can.
-- Voltaire		 
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
-- Voltaire		 
It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
-- Voltaire		 
History is fables agreed upon.
-- Voltaire		 
The monster, fanaticism, still exists, and whoever seeks after truth will run the risk of being persecuted.
-- Voltaire		 
The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.
-- Voltaire		 
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
-- Voltaire		 
What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature.
-- Voltaire		 
I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.
-- Voltaire		 
The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.
-- Voltaire		 
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
-- Voltaire		 
We are all full of weakness and errors, let us mutually pardon each other our follies. It is the first law of nature.
-- Voltaire		 
Prejudices are what fools use for reason.
-- Voltaire		 
The tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over the rights of others, and then exercises its power to change the laws in its favor.
-- Voltaire		 
The death of Lincoln was a disaster for Christendom. There was no man in the United States great enough to wear his boots and the bankers went anew to grab the riches. I fear that foreign bankers with their craftiness and tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it to systematically corrupt civilisation.
-- Otto von Bismarck		 
The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night.
-- Otto von Bismarck		 
A little caution outflanks a large cavalry.
-- Otto von Bismarck		 
War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.
-- Karl von Clausewitz		 
No one starts a war -- or rather no one in his senses ought to do so -- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve in that war and how he intends to conduct it.
-- Karl von Clausewitz		 
If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us at least live so as to deserve it.
-- Immanuel Hermann von Fichte		 
Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime,  suppress minorities and still remain democratic.
-- Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn		 
Ten million ignorances do not constitute one knowledge.
-- Clemens von Metternich		 
The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.
-- Ludwig Von Mises		 
The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state.
-- Ludwig Von Mises		 
The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. It is a process.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society, nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society. The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Many of those who attack capitalism know very well that their situation under any other economic system will be less favorable. Nevertheless, with full knowledge of this fact, they advocate a reform, e.g., socialism, because they hope that the rich, whom they envy, will also suffer under it.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
There are for man only two principles available for a mental grasp of reality, namely, those of teleology and causality. What cannot be brought under either of these categories is absolutely hidden to the human mind. An event not open to an interpretation by one of these two principles is for man inconceivable and mysterious. Change can be conceived as the outcome either of the operation of mechanistic causality or of purposeful behavior; for the human mind there is no third way available.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
True, a socialistic society could see that 1000 litres of wine were better than 800 litres. It could decide whether or not 1000 litres of wine were to be preferred to 500 litres of oil. Such a decision would involve no calculation. The will of some man would decide. But the real business of economic administration, the adaptation of means to ends only begins when such a decision is taken. And only economic calculation makes this adaptation possible. Without such assistance, in the bewildering chaos of alternative materials and processes the human mind would be at a complete loss. Whenever we had to decide between different processes or different centres of production, we would be entirely at sea.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life that can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
-- Ludwig Von Mises		 
The struggle for freedom ... is not the struggle of the many against the few, but of minorities -- sometimes of a minority of but one man -- against the majority.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power. An economist can never be a favorite of autocrats and demagogues. With them he is always the mischief-maker, and the more they are inwardly convinced that his objections are well-founded, the more they hate him.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final or total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Depression and mass unemployment are not caused by the free market, but by government interference in the economy.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Modern society, based as it is on the division of labor, can be preserved only under conditions of lasting peace.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight!
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
The direction of all economic affairs is in the market society a task of the entrepreneurs. Theirs is the control of production. They are at the helm and steer the ship. A superficial observer would believe that they are supreme. But they are not. They are bound to obey unconditionally the captain's orders. The captain is the consumer. ...[Consumers] make poor people rich and rich people poor. They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Those who call themselves "liberals" today are asking for policies which are precisely the opposite of those policies which the liberals of the nineteenth century advocated in their liberal programs. The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial -- that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Violent resistance against the power of the state is the last resort of the minority in its effort to break loose from the oppression of the majority. ... The citizen must not be so narrowly circumscribed in his activities that, if he thinks differently from those in power, his only choice is either to perish or to destroy the machinery of state.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be. It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build, it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe...
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
The common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
The first thing a genius needs is to breath free air.
-- Ludwig Von Mises		 
This, then, is freedom in the external life of man -- that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer.
-- Ludwig von Mises		 
Against nature and within nature there is no freedom.
-- Ludwig Von Mises		 
It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine’s correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconscious convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines.
-- Ludwig Von Mises		 
We do not know of how much a man is capable if he has the will, and to what point he will raise himself if he feels free.
-- Johannes von Muller		 
One does what one is; one becomes what one does.
-- Robert von Musil		 
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
-- William Von Raab		 
Man is created free, and is free, even though born in chains. [Ger., Der Mensch ist frei geschaffen, ist frei Und wurd' er in Ketten geboren.]
-- Johann von Schiller		 
The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.
-- Johann von Schiller		 
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it absolutely vile!
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.		 
All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values…and I say let’s get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States – and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.		 
We are what we pretend to be.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.		 
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.		 
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.		 
The banks -- commercial banks and the Federal Reserve -- create all the money of this nation and its people pay interest on every dollar of that newly created money. Which means that private banks exercise unconstitutionally, immorally, and ridiculously the power to tax the people. For every newly created dollar dilutes to some extent the value of every other dollar already in circulation.
-- Jerry Voorhis		 
What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom 'to' and freedom 'from'.
-- Marilyn vos Savant		 
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.
-- Marilyn vos Savant		 
Right now, I'd rather be in Sweden than in the U.S. because we have seen the problems and are moving away from the welfare state. On your side of the Atlantic you are moving right into it, and you risk destroying your country.
-- Ian Wachtmeister		 
Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.
-- Charles Wagner		 
Stop wasting jail space on prostitutes, drug users and other victimless criminals. Even if we find it morally acceptable to imprison these people for choices they make regarding their bodies, we must realize that we simply cannot afford to continue clogging the court system and the prison system with these harmless criminals.
-- Edward B. Wagner		 
There is one 'word' that the message of the Bible is all about... and that is "LOVE"... different bible versions can be interpreted many ways... But, regardless how many times the wording is changed or interpreted... 'LOVE' always is the 'word'
-- Jesse Charles Wagner II		 
A physicist is an atoms way of knowing about atoms.
-- George Wald		 
Given the ambiguity of religious texts and teachings, the mixed historical record, and the empirical evidence, it would be foolhardy to assert that religious faith necessarily upholds democratic values.
-- Kenneth D. Wald		 
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
-- Alice Walker		 
Look at America now; older middle-income Americans are encouraged to divest themselves of their assets in order to qualify for Medicaid so that taxpayers at large must subsidize the costs of warehousing the artificially impoverished nursing homes -- in the name of “independent living” and “not being a burden to the children.”
-- Daniel F. Walker		 
I consider it my duty to tell you of the extremely dangerous threats that lie ahead. I know for certain that we are now in a period of the greatest strategic deception, perhaps in all history ...The Cold War is NOT over, only in the state of remission ...The Soviet Union is not truly 'on the verge of collapse'. Western defense, on the other hand, is.
-- General Sir Walter Walker		 
Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?
-- George Wallace		 
In some ways, certain books are more powerful by far than any battle.
-- Henry Wallace		 
I tell you true, liberty is the best of all things; never live beneath the noose of a servile halter.
-- William Wallace		 
When you pay social security taxes, you are in no way making provision for your own retirement. You are paying the pensions of those who are already retired. Once you understand this, you see that whether you will get the benefits you are counting on when you retire depends on whether Congress will levy enough taxes, borrow enough, or print enough money...
-- W. Allen Wallis		 
Today government touches everything in America and harms almost everything it touches. Federal, state, and local governments together spend 42 out of every 100 dollars we earn. Those who do the taxing and spending have long since ceased to work for the people as a whole. Rather, they work for themselves and for their clients—the education industry, the welfare culture, public-employee unions, etc..
-- Malcolm Wallop		 
Though I admire republican principles in theory, yet I am afraid the practice may be too perfect for human nature. We tried a republic last century, and it failed. Let our enemies try next. I hate political experiments.
-- Sir Robert Walpole		 
From the utopian viewpoint, the United States constitution is a singularly hard-bitten and cautious document, for it breathes the spirit of skepticism about human altruism and incorporates a complex system of checks, balances and restrictions, so that everybody is holding the reins on everybody else.
-- Chad Walsh		 
And here lies the great irony. The people who are the most opposed to free expression are the same people who want to express themselves as freely, outrageously, and disturbingly as imaginable. Self-expression is a right that they want to keep all to themselves. The rest of us must express ourselves in a way that conforms precisely to their wishes. They demand that we adjust our language — adjust our perception of reality itself — to meld with their delusions. "Here is the script you must follow," announces the man who refuses to even follow his own biology.
-- Matt Walsh		 
The news media in general are liberals.
-- Barbara Walters		 
I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, 'That which is everybody's business is nobody's business'.
-- Izaak Walton		 
All growth, including political growth, is the result of risk-taking.
-- Jude Wanniski		 
We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent.
-- James Paul Warburg		 
If the major opportunities for future growth of government lie in the area of conventional taxation, are there any defenses available to the citizenry? ... Perhaps the most fruitful advice comes in two parts. The first piece of advice is to avoid war and the rumor of war: this is history's greatest boon to the tax man. ... The second piece of advice is to seek ways of inhibiting government's ability conveniently to increase its collections. Possibly the very increase in that ability that is in prospect can be turned to account by a constitutional provision which forbade the income tax, and perhaps even the storage of information regarding individual incomes by third parties, including government.
-- Benjamin Ward		 
The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and national independence and submergence into an all powerful, one world government.
-- Rear Admiral Chester Ward		 
Death and Taxes, they are certain.
-- Edward Ward		 
The secret of the superiority of state over private education lies in the fact that in the former the teacher is responsible to society ... [T]he result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils.
-- Lester Frank Ward		 
No man shall twice be sentenced by Civil Justice for one and the same crime, offense, or trespass.
-- Nathaniel Ward		 
If a law to donate aid to any farmer or cattleman who has had poor crops or lost his cattle comes within the meaning of the phrase “to provide for the General Welfare of the United States,” why should not similar gifts be made to grocers, shopkeepers, miners, and other businessmen who have made losses through financial depression, or to wage earners out of employment? Why is not their property equally within the purview of the General Welfare?
-- Charles Warren		 
The censor’s sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression.
-- Earl Warren		 
Life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.
-- Earl Warren		 
Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.
-- Earl Warren		 
A republic is not an easy form of government to live under, and when the responsibility of citizenship is evaded, democracy decays and authoritarianism takes over.
-- Earl Warren		 
[O]ur War of the Revolution was, in good measure, fought as a protest against standing armies.
-- Earl Warren		 
The only protection of every citizen from such deprivation of rights is a strict adherence to the Bill of Rights by everyone for everyone. This should be self-evident but the danger of erosion of rights stems largely from the fact that so many citizens of the majority, who have never been deprived of any of these rights, find it difficult to understand what the deprivation of them means in the lives of others.
-- Earl Warren		 
Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness to our society.
-- Earl Warren		 
The mere summoning of a witness and compelling him to testify against his will, about his beliefs, expressions or associations, is a measure of governmental interference. And when those forced revelations concern maters that are unorthodox, unpopular, or even hateful to the general public, the reactions in the life of the witness may be disastrous.
-- Earl Warren		 
To require conformity in the appreciation of sentiments or the interpretation of language, or uniformity of thought, feeling, or action, is a fundamental error in human legislation -- a madness which would be only equaled by requiring all men to possess the same countenance, the same voice or the same stature.
-- Josiah Warren		 
The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us.
-- Josiah Warren		 
Honesty is never seen sitting astride the fence.
-- Lemuel K. Washburn		 
You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
-- Booker T. Washington		 
I never liked the atmosphere of Washington. I early saw that it was impossible to build up a race of which the leaders were spending most of their time, thought and energy in trying to get into office, or in trying to stay there after they were in.
-- Booker T. Washington		 
Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top.
-- Booker T. Washington		 
I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.
-- Booker T. Washington		 
There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well.
-- Booker T. Washington		 
There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who do not want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.
-- Booker T. Washington		 
A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn’t become right and evil doesn’t become good just because it’s accepted by a majority.
-- Booker T. Washington		 
It is not my intention to doubt that the doctrine of the Illuminati and the principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more satisfied of this fact than I am.. The idea that I meant to convey, was, that I did not believe that the Lodges of Free Masons in this Country had, as Societies, endeavoured to propagate the diabolical tenets of the first, or pernicious principles of the latter (if they are susceptible of separation). That Individuals of them may have done it, or that the founder, or instrument employed to found, the Democratic Societies in the United States, may have had these objects; and actually had a separation of the People from their Government in view, is too evident to be questioned.
-- George Washington		 
A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite.
-- George Washington		 
All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity.
-- George Washington		 
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
-- George Washington		 
Happiness is more effectually dispensed to mankind under a republican form of government than any other.
-- George Washington		 
Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.
-- George Washington		 
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, (I conjure you to believe me fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government.
-- George Washington		 
The executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity.
-- George Washington		 
Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.
-- George Washington		 
The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.
-- George Washington (False)		 
If we are wise, let us prepare for the worst.
-- George Washington		 
There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This, within certain limits, is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party: but, in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.
-- George Washington		 
There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily.
-- George Washington		 
I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.
-- George Washington		 
The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations to have as little political connection as possible... Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalships, interest, humor, or caprice?... It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.
-- George Washington		 
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.
-- George Washington (False)		 

-- George Washington		 
To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.
-- George Washington		 
A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one nation the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
-- George Washington		 
It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn.
-- George Washington		 
No pecuniary consideration is more urgent, than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt: on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more valuable.
-- George Washington		 
But if we are to be told by a foreign Power ... what we shall do, and what we shall not do, we have Independence yet to seek, and have contended hitherto for very little.
-- George Washington		 
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is force, and like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
-- George Washington (False)		 
I cannot conceive a rank more honorable, than that which flows from the uncorrupted choice of a brave and free people, the purest source and original fountain of all power.
-- George Washington		 
While, then, every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in Union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations... Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.
-- George Washington		 
In time of peace, prepare for war.
-- George Washington		 
Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence. The church, the plow, the prairie wagon, and citizen's firearms are indelibly related. From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences, and tendencies prove that to insure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and the pistol are equally indispensable. Every corner of this land knows firearms, and more than 99 99/100 percent of them by their silence indicate they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference; they deserve a place with all that's good. When firearms go, all goes; we need them every hour.
-- George Washington (False)		 
Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens,) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove, that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government. But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defence against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation, and excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.
-- George Washington		 
As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear. The execution of these maxims belongs to your representatives, but it is necessary that public opinion should co-operate.
-- George Washington		 
I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.
-- George Washington		 
The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend on God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.
-- George Washington		 
May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.
-- George Washington		 
Avoid occasions of expense ... and avoid likewise the accumulation of debt not only by shunning occasions of expense but by vigorous exertions to discharge the debts, not throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.
-- George Washington		 
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
-- George Washington		 
Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.
-- George Washington		 
There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation.
-- George Washington		 
If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
-- George Washington		 
My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: Being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so.
-- George Washington		 
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism … The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
-- George Washington		 
Republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination. On the contrary, laws, under no form of government, are better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind.
-- George Washington		 
The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.
-- George Washington		 
No country upon earth ever had it more in its power to attain these blessings than United America. Wondrously strange, then, and much to be regretted indeed would it be, were we to neglect the means and to depart from the road which Providence has pointed us to so plainly; I cannot believe it will ever come to pass.
-- George Washington		 
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
-- George Washington		 
...and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint committee requested me to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially a form of government for their safety and happiness. Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November, next to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being Who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, or will be ...that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to there becoming a nation... And also that we then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions... to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a governmment of wise, just and Constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed...(and) to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among us...given under my hand at the City of New York, the 3rd day of October in the Year of Our Lord 1789.
-- George Washington		 
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissensions, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty. Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils, and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.
-- George Washington		 
Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal.
-- George Washington		 
Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest prop of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge in the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle... Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it?
-- George Washington		 
The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position.
-- George Washington		 
Should, hereafter, those incited by the lust of power and prompted by the supineness or venality of their constituents, overleap the known barriers of this Constitution and violate the unalienable rights of humanity: it will only serve to show, that no compact among men (however provident in its construction and sacred in its ratification) can be pronounced everlasting and inviolable, and if I may so express myself, that no Wall of words, that no mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.
-- George Washington		 
The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
-- George Washington		 
Occupants of public offices love power and are prone to abuse it.
-- George Washington		 
My policy has been, and will continue to be, while I have the honor to remain in the administration of the government, to be upon friendly terms with, but independent of, all the nations of the earth. To share in the broils of none. To fulfil our own engagements. To supply the wants, and be carriers for them all: Being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so.
-- George Washington		 
Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of Liberty abused to licentiousness.
-- George Washington		 
If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
-- George Washington		 
There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation. 'Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.
-- George Washington		 
Interwoven is the love of liberty with every ligament of the heart.
-- George Washington		 
May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.
-- George Washington		 
[T]he policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people.
-- George Washington		 
If I could have entertained the slightest apprehension that the Constitution framed by the Convention, where I had the honor to preside, might possibly endanger the religious rights of any ecclesiastical Society, certainly I would never have placed my signature to it.
-- George Washington		 
The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances.
-- Martha Washington		 
Tolerance, respect for human differences and civility are the hallmarks of an educated person. Every university seeks to foster these qualities in its students. But these qualities cannot be taught by punishing a student for saying or writing what he pleases, even if he is wrongheaded and offensive to authority figures or organized groups of peers.
-- Washington Post		 
Impeachment is about whatever the Congress says it is. There is no law that dictates impeachment. What the Constitution says is “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and we define that.
-- Maxine Waters		 
Monopoly favors the rich (on the whole) just as competition (on the whole) favors the poor.
-- George Watson		 
You know, if you're going to make the next step in a major scientific thing, no one knows how to do it so you have to, in a sense, reject your professors and say, 'They're not getting anywhere, I'm going to try something else.' Crick and I did that at one stage and we're famous practically because we thought that what other people were doing won't get anywhere.
-- James D. Watson		 
As we celebrate the 100th birthday of Margaret Sanger, our outrageous and our courageous leader, we will probably find a number of areas in which we may find more about Margaret Sanger than we thought we wanted to know...
-- Faye Wattleton		 
But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies.
-- Alan Watts		 
We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.
-- Alan Watts		 
Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
-- Alan Watts		 
My father taught that the only helping hand you're ever going to be able to rely on is the one at the end of your sleeve.
-- J. C. Watts, Jr.		 
The government taxes you when you bring home a paycheck. It taxes you when you make a phone call. It taxes you when you turn on a light. It taxes you when you sell a stock. It taxes you when you fill your car with gas. It taxes you when you ride a plane. It taxes you when you get married. Then it taxes you when you die. This is taxual insanity and it must end.
-- J. C. Watts, Jr.		 
Character is doing what's right when nobody's looking.
-- J. C. Watts, Jr.		 
Too often when we talk about racial healing, we make the old assumption that government can heal the racial divide. … Republicans and Democrats – red, yellow, black and white – have to understand that we must individually, all of us, accept our share of responsibility. … It does not happen by dividing us into racial groups. It does not happen by trying to turn rich against poor or by using the politics of fear. It does not happen by reducing our values to the lowest common denominator. And friends, it does not happen by asking Americans to accept what’s immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance.
-- J. C. Watts, Jr.		 
For the past 30 years our nation’s spent $5 trillion trying to erase poverty, and the result, as you know, is that we didn’t get rid of it at all. In fact, we spread it. We destroyed the self-esteem of millions of people, grinding them down in a welfare system that penalizes moms for wanting to marry the father of their children, and penalizes moms for wanting to save money. Friends, that’s not right.
-- J. C. Watts, Jr.		 
We must be a people who dare, dare to take responsibility for our hatred and fears and ask God to heal us from within. And we must be a people of prayer, a people who pray as if the strength of our nation depended on it, because it does.
-- J. C. Watts, Jr.		 
Remind students that one of the central missions of the university, which justifies its existence, is to get at the truth. That requires honest debate, patience, intellectual honesty, investigation, and a lot of hard work. But it also is not for the faint of heart. And that is a lesson that is almost never transmitted today. That offense, bruising thoughts, and unpleasant facts simply go with the territory. They are an intrinsic feature of an open society, and they never can be entirely avoided.
-- Amy Wax		 
The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.
-- John Walter Wayland		 
We built your fort. We will not have it used against us.
-- John Wayne		 
Give the American people a good cause, and there's nothing they can't lick.
-- John Wayne		 
It rankles me when somebody tries to force somebody to do something.
-- John Wayne		 
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind.
-- Henry Grady Weaver		 
The Greeks... labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative.
-- Henry Grady Weaver		 
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means.
-- Henry Grady Weaver		 
We create the government that screws you, and then you’re supposed to thank us for protecting you from it.
-- Vin Weber		 
I shall defer my visit to Faneuil Hall, the cradle of American liberty, until its doors shall fly open, on golden hinges, to lovers of Union as well as of Liberty.
-- Daniel Webster		 
The contest, for ages, has been to rescue Liberty from the grasp of executive power.
-- Daniel Webster		 
God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.
-- Daniel Webster		 
On the light of Liberty you saw arise the light of Peace, like "another morn," "Risen on mid-noon;" and the sky on which you closed your eye was cloudless.
-- Daniel Webster		 
If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety.
-- Daniel Webster		 
He who tampers with the currency robs labor of its bread.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what they may.
-- Daniel Webster		 
There is no happiness, there is no liberty, there is no enjoyment of life, unless a man can say, when he rises in the morning, I shall be subject to the decision of no unwise judge today.
-- Daniel Webster		 
If the Union was formed by accession of States then the Union may be dissolved by the secession of States.
-- Daniel Webster		 
No power but Congress can declare war; but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war? ... [T]hese remarks originate purely in a desire to maintain the powers of government as they are established by the Constitution between the different departments, and hope that, whether we have conquests or no conquests, war or no war, peace or no peace, we shall yet preserve, in its integrity and strength, the Constitution of the United States.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money.
-- Daniel Webster		 
If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn.
-- Daniel Webster		 
The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.
-- Daniel Webster		 
No power but Congress can declare war, but what is the value of this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make such military movements as must bring on war?
-- Daniel Webster		 
No government is respectable which is not just. Without unspotted purity of public faith, without sacred public principle, fidelity, and honor, no machinery of laws, can give dignity to political society.
-- Daniel Webster		 
The man is free who is protected from injury.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.
-- Daniel Webster		 
The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government.
-- Daniel Webster		 
The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
-- Daniel Webster		 
We may be tossed upon an ocean where we can see no land -- nor, perhaps, the sun or stars. But there is a chart and a compass for us to study, to consult, and to obey. That chart is the Constitution.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be trusted on any other foundation than religious principle, not any government secure which is not supported by moral habits.... Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly and wickedness of the government may engage itself? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest right of personal liberty? Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint; the more restraint on others to keep off from us, the more liberty we have.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Love your country but fear its government.
-- Daniel Webster		 
We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people.
-- Daniel Webster		 
The States are nations.
-- Daniel Webster		 
I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. -- From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Knowledge is the only fountain both of love and the principles of human liberty.
-- Daniel Webster		 
No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country.
-- Daniel Webster		 
If the States were not left to leave the Union when their rights were interfered with, the government would have been National, but the Convention refused to baptize it by that name.
-- Daniel Webster		 
Another source of power in government is a military force. But this, to be efficient, must be superior to any force that exists among the people, or which they can command; for otherwise this force would be annihilated, on the first exercise of acts of oppression. Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive.
-- Noah Webster		 
In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate -- look at his character. It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political stations. But the scriptures teach a different doctrine. They direct that rulers should be men who rule in the fear of God, men of truth, hating covetousness. It is to the neglect of this rule that we must ascribe the multiplied frauds, breaches of trust, speculations and embezzlements of public property which astonish even ourselves; which tarnish the character of our country and which disgrace our government. When a citizen gives his vote to a man of known immorality, he abuses his civic responsibility; he not only sacrifices his own responsibility; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country.
-- Noah Webster		 
The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scripture ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws. All the miseries and evil men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.
-- Noah Webster		 
Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.
-- Noah Webster		 
But what is tyranny? Or how can a free people be deprived of their liberties? Tyranny is the exercise of some power over a man, which is not warranted by law, or necessary for the public safety. A people can never be deprived of their liberties, while they retain in their own hands, a power sufficient to any other power in the state.
-- Noah Webster		 
Why not include a provision that everybody shall, in good weather, hunt on his own land and catch fish in rivers that are public property and that Congress shall never restrain any inhabitant of America from eating and drinking, at seasonable times, or prevent his lying on his left side, in a long winter's night, or even on his back, when he is fatigued by lying on his right.
-- Noah Webster		 
When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers, 'just men who will rule in the fear of God.' The preservation of [our] government depends on the faithful discharge of this Duty; if the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded. If [our] government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the Divine Commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the Laws.
-- Noah Webster		 
Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against.
-- Samuel Webster		 
The biblical exhortation to 'Be fruitful and multiply,' was directed toward a small tribe, surrounded by enemies. We are long past that. Our survival depends upon our developing a population where everyone, contributes. We don't need more cannon fodder. We don't need more parishioners, We don't need more cheap labor. We don't need more poor babies.
-- Ron Weddington		 
Condoms alone won't do it. Depo-Provera, Norplant and the new birth control injection being developed in India are not a complete answer ... No, government is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions...RU 486 and conventional abortions. Even if we make birth control as ubiquitous as sneakers and junk food, there will still be unplanned pregnancies.
-- Ron Weddington		 
But you can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I'm, not advocating some, sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies. There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true, but we only whisper it, because as liberals who believe in individual rights, we view any program which might treat the disadvantaged differently as discriminatory, mean-spirited and...well...so Republican.
-- Ron Weddington		 
Men must have the right of choice, even to choose wrong, if he shall ever learn to choose right.
-- Josiah C. Wedgwood		 
In Europe, when tobacco was first introduced, it was immediately banned. In Turkey, if you got caught with tobacco, you had your nose slit. China and Russia imposed the death penalty for possession of tobacco.
-- Andrew Weil, MD		 
There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime – namely, repressive justice.
-- Simone Weil		 
Liberty consists in the ability to choose.
-- Simone Weil		 
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
-- Simone Weil		 
Neither the trappings of robes, nor temples of stone, nor a fixed liturgy, nor an extensive literature or history is required to meet the test of beliefs cognizable under the Constitution as religious. So far as our law is concerned, one person's religious beliefs held for one day are presumptively entitled to the same protection as the beliefs of millions which have been shared for thousands of years.
-- Judge Jack B. Weinstein		 
Nullification is but one legitimate result in an appropriate constitutional process safeguarded by judges and the judicial system. When juries refuse to convict on the basis of what they think are unjust laws, they are performing their duty as jurors.
-- Judge Jack B. Weinstein		 
For the Order wishes to be secret, and to work in silence, for thus it is better secured from the oppression of the ruling powers, and because this secrecy gives a greater zest to the whole.
-- Adam Weishaupt		 
By establishing reading societies, and subscription libraries, and taking these under our direction, and supplying them through our labors, we may turn the public mind which way we will.
-- Adam Weishaupt		 
The great strength of our Order lies in its concealment; let it never appear in any place in its own name, but always concealed by another name, and another occupation. None is fitter than the lower degrees of Freemasonry; the public is accustomed to it, expects little from it, and therefore takes little notice of it. Next to this, the form of a learned or literary society is best suited to our purpose, and had Freemasonry not existed, this cover would have been employed; and it may be much more than a cover, it may be a powerful engine in our hands. … A Literary Society is the most proper form for the introduction of our Order into any state where we are yet strangers.
-- Adam Weishaupt		 
Of all the means I know to lead men, the most effectual is a concealed mystery. The hankering of the mind is irresistible.
-- Adam Weishaupt		 
I am proud to be known to the world as the founder of the Illuminati.
-- Adam Weishaupt		 
We must win the common people in every corner. This will be obtained chiefly by means of the schools; and by open, hearty behavior, show condescension, popularity, and toleration of their prejudices, which we shall at leisure root out and dispel.
-- Adam Weishaupt		 
The most wonderful thing of all is that the distinguished Lutheran and Calvinist theologians who belong to our order really believe that they see in it (Illuminati) the true and genuine sense of Christian Religion. Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?
-- Adam Weishaupt		 
I want for our country enough laws to restrain me from injuring others, so that these laws will also restrain others from injuring me. I want enough government, with enough constitutional safeguards, so that this necessary minimum of laws will be applied equitably to everybody, and will be binding on the rulers as well as those ruled. Beyond that I want neither laws nor government to be imposed on our people as a means or with the excuse of protecting us from catching cold, or of seeing that we raise the right kind of crops, or of forcing us to live in the right kind of houses or neighborhoods, or of compelling us to save money or to spend it, or of telling us when or whether we can pray. I do not want government or laws designed for any other form of welfarism or paternalism, based on the premise that government knows best and can run our lives better than we can run them ourselves. And my concept of freedom, and of its overwhelming importance, is implicit in these aspirations and ideals.
-- Robert Welch		 
The real freedom of any individual can always be measured by the amount of responsibility which he must assume for his own welfare and security.
-- Robert Welch		 
Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.
-- Orson Welles		 
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
-- Bob Wells		 
Moral indignation: jealousy with a halo.
-- H. G. Wells		 
Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.
-- H. G. Wells		 
The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate -- shall I say third-rate? -- mind, Karl Marx.
-- H. G. Wells		 
... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.
-- H. G. Wells		 
... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.
-- H. G. Wells		 
The Communists could succeed if we ever let ourselves be lulled into thinking that they are no longer dangerous to us externally and internally. They would be victorious if we were ever duped by their own nationals or by foolish Americans -- if we were ever duped into believing that they are not aggressive, atheist socialist imperialists. They have proved they never sleep. They have never permanently retreated, and what seems at a particular time to be a cessation of their forward movement or a change in their designs is nothing more than a tactical maneuver on another front.
-- Kenneth D. Wells		 
When freedom prevails, the ingenuity and inventiveness of people creates incredible wealth. This is the source of the natural improvement of the human condition.
-- Brian S. Wesbury		 
Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.
-- John Wesley		 
The first of the dreams that [my parents] instilled in me was individual responsibility and accountability. They taught me that in life you have consequences to each and every decision that you make, and when you try to shy away from those decisions, when you try to shy away from those consequences then someone will come in and allow you to be seen as a victim, and when you become seen as a victim, it’s a spiraling slope downward and downward. Before the next thing you know, you become dependent upon something and right here in the United States of America this is one of the things that we combat against because too many Americans are being castigated as victims. Too many Americans are not being individually responsible and accountable. Too many Americans are becoming dependent upon government and therefore government continues to grow. My parents and their dream was to have a son that was not a victim, but a son that was a victor, and that enables me to stand here before you today.
-- Col. Allen West		 
When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before.
-- Mae West		 
I believe in censorship. After all, I made a fortune out of it.
-- Mae West		 
But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.
-- Rebecca West		 
God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.
-- Rebecca West		 
There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.
-- Rebecca West		 
A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and state, and for lawful hunting and recreational use.
-- West Virginia Constitution		 
Freedom of communication means, clearly and unquestionably, freedom to speak, debate, and write in privacy; to share confidence with intimates and confidants, and to prepare positions in groups and institutions for presentation to the public at a later point.
-- Alan Westin		 
The denial or revocation of a parenting license would be expected to be a painful experience, particularly for mothers. The overall importance of protecting innocent children from incompetent parenting justifies the inconvenience to a few parents and the inevitable imperfections of a licensing system.
-- Jack C. Westman		 
Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
-- General William Westmoreland		 
There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick.
-- Grover Whalen		 
We are only so free that others may be free as well as we.
-- Benjamin Whichcote		 
While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal, substances.
-- Justice Byron R. White		 
The last great delusion is soon to open before us. Antichrist is to perform his marvelous works in our sight. So closely will the counterfeit resemble the true that it will be impossible to distinguish between them except by the Holy Scriptures.
-- Ellen G. White		 
It is labor that keeps the strong man strong. And spiritual labor, toil and burden-bearing, is what will give strength to the church of Christ.
-- Ellen G. White		 
I believe... that security declines as security machinery expands.
-- E. B. White		 
Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men.
-- E. B. White		 
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
-- E. B. White		 
Commuter - one who spends his life In riding to and from his wife; A man who shaves and takes a train, And then rides back to shave again.
-- E. B. White		 
The banks do create money. They have been doing it for a long time, but they didn't realise it, and they did not admit it. Very few did. You will find it in all sorts of documents, financial textbooks, etc. But in the intervening years, and we must be perfectly frank about these things, there has been a development of thought, until today I doubt very much whether you would get many prominent bankers to attempt to deny that banks create it.
-- H. W. White		 
History is a means of access to ourselves.
-- Lynn White, Jr.		 
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment.
-- T. H. White		 
You can have no wise laws nor free enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people -- and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive.
-- William Allen White		 
Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.
-- William Allen White		 
You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress, and I reply with the sad truth that only in time of stress is freedom of utterance in danger… Only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed it is most vital to justice.
-- William Allen White		 
There but for the grace of God go I.
-- Rev. George Whitefield		 
Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy.
-- Alfred North Whitehead		 
The creation of the world -- said Plato -- is the victory of persuasion over force... Civilization is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilization, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals... Now the intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of these two forms: force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force.
-- Alfred North Whitehead		 
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
-- Alfred North Whitehead		 
Whatever the issue might be, whether it’s mass surveillance, no-knock raids, or the right to freely express one’s views about the government, we’ve moved into a new age in which the rights of the citizenry are being treated as a secondary concern by the White House, Congress, the courts and their vast holding of employees, including law enforcement officials.
-- John W. Whitehead		 
In recent years we have witnessed numerous marches on Washington in which one group or another has demanded new “rights.” Frequently, such rights have not meant freedom from state control, but rather entitlement to state action, protection, or subsidy. In the process of yielding to the “will of the people” and creating new rights, the state invariably enlarges itself and its bureaucracy. Each new right seems to demand a new agency to guarantee it, administer it, or deliver it.
-- John W. Whitehead		 
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
-- Walt Whitman		 
Freedom's soil hath only place For a free and fearless race!
-- John Greenleaf Whittier		 
The nations lift their right hands up and swear Their oath of freedom.
-- John Greenleaf Whittier		 
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been!
-- John Greenleaf Whittier		 
The slave will be free. Democracy in America will yet be a glorious reality; and when the top-stone of that temple of freedom which our fathers left unfinished shall be brought forth with shoutings and cries of grace unto it, when our now drooping Liberty lifts up her head and prospers, happy will he be who can say, with John Milton, "Among those who have something more than wished her welfare, I, too, have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and my heirs."
-- John Greenleaf Whittier		 
You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common, they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable, if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.
-- Doctor Who		 
If the true freedom of the press is to decide for itself what to publish and when to publish it, the true responsibility of the press must be to assert and defend that freedom… What the press in America needs is less inhibition, not more restraint.
-- Tom Wicker		 
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
-- Norbert Wiener		 
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
-- Elie Wiesel		 
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
-- Elie Wiesel		 
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
-- Elie Wiesel		 
Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence.
-- Albert Edward Wiggin		 
As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
All authority is quite degrading.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. ... One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great, individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist ...
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
He hasn't one redeeming vice.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress had been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Lawyers have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
[T]hough of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
-- Oscar Wilde		 
Progressives understand that their program for a government-centered society becomes more plausible the more people believe that work -- individual striving -- is unavailing. Government grows as fatalism grows, and fatalism grows as progressivism inculcates in people the demoralizing -- make that de-moralizing -- belief that they are victims of circumstances.
-- George Will		 
It has been well said that really up-to-date liberals do not care what people do, as long as it is compulsory.
-- George Will		 
The cultivation -- even celebration -- of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.
-- George Will		 
Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.
-- George Will		 
The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of America is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.
-- George Will		 
The Framers of the First Amendment were not concerned with preventing government from abridging their freedom to speak about crops and cockfighting, or with protecting the expressive activity of topless dancers, which of late has found some shelter under the First Amendment. Rather, the Framers cherished unabridged freedom of political communication.
-- George Will		 
The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality.   People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government.
-- George Will		 
There is sufficient evidence that a number of societies, of the Illuminati, have been established in this land of Gospel light and civil liberty, which were first organized from the grand society, in France. They are doubtless secretly striving to undermine all our ancient institutions, civil and sacred. These societies are closely leagued with those of the same Order, in Europe; they have all the same object in view. The enemies of all order are seeking our ruin. Should infidelity generally prevail, our independence would fall of course. Our republican government would be annihilated.
-- Joseph Willard		 
If you mind your own business, you won't be minding mine.
-- Hank Williams		 
I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount of blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals. Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don’t fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America. Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom.
-- Juan Williams		 
God requireth not a uniformity of religion.
-- Roger Williams		 
We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.
-- Tad Williams		 
We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.
-- Tad Williams		 
The mistake you make is in trying to figure it out.
-- Tenessee Williams		 
Communism and socialism is [sic] seductive. It promises us that people will contribute according to ability and receive according to needs. Everybody is equal. Everybody has a right to decent housing, decent food and affordable medical care. History should have taught us that when we hear people talk this stuff -- watch out!
-- Walter E. Williams		 
The bottom line is that we've become a nation of thieves, a value rejected by our founders. James Madison, the father of our Constitution, was horrified when Congress appropriated $15,000 to help French refugees. He said, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." Tragically, today's Americans would run Madison out of town on a rail.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation’s tyrants and their useful idiots. ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
What’s “just” has been debated for centuries, but let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then, tell me how much of what I earn “belongs” to you -- and why?
-- Walter E. Williams		 
All we have to do now is to inform the public that the payment of social security taxes is voluntary and watch the mass exodus.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Liberalism is a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs. Liberalism undermines the spirit of self-help and individual responsibility. For liberals in academia, the fact that black college students earn lower grades and have a higher dropout rate than any group besides reservation Indians means that blacks remain stymied and victimized by white racism. Thus, their push for affirmative action and other race-based programs is to assuage their guilt and shame for America’s past by having people around with black skin color. The heck with the human being inside that skin.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Conservatives and liberals are kindred spirits as far as government spending is concerned. ... Since government has no resources of its own, and since there’s no Tooth Fairy handing Congress the funds for the programs it enacts, we are forced to recognize that government spending is no less than the confiscation of one person’s property to give it to another to whom it does not belong -- in effect, legalized theft.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
How does something immoral, when done privately, become moral when it is done collectively? Furthermore, does legality establish morality? Slavery was legal; apartheid is legal; Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist urges were legal. Clearly, the fact of legality does not justify these crimes. Legality, alone, cannot be the talisman of moral people.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
The War between the States... produced the foundation for the kind of government we have today: consolidated and absolute, based on the unrestrained will of the majority, with force, threats, and intimidation being the order of the day. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. ... [The War] also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
The framers gave us the Second Amendment not so we could go deer or duck hunting but to give us a modicum of protection against congressional tyranny.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Wealth comes from successful individual efforts to please one’s fellow man ... that’s what competition is all about: “out pleasing” your competitors to win over the consumers.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Many politicians and pundits claim that the credit crunch and high mortgage foreclosure rate is an example of market failure and want government to step in to bail out creditors and borrowers at the expense of taxpayers who prudently managed their affairs. These financial problems are not market failures but government failure. ... The credit crunch and foreclosure problems are failures of government policy.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Try this thought experiment. Pretend you're a tyrant. Among your many liberty-destroying objectives are extermination of blacks, Jews and Catholics. Which would you prefer, a United States with political power centralized in Washington, powerful government agencies with detailed information on Americans and compliant states or power widely dispersed over 50 states, thousands of local jurisdictions and a limited federal government?
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
We should view our government the way we should a friendly, cuddly lion. Just because he’s friendly and cuddly shouldn’t blind us to the fact that he’s still got teeth and claws.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
People want government to do all manner of things, things that if done privately would lead to condemnation and jail sentences. Some want government to give money to farmers, poor folk, college students, senior citizens and businesses. There’s no Santa Claus or tooth fairy. The only way government can give money to one person is to forcibly take it from another person. If I privately used the same method to raise money for a “deserving” college student, homeless person or businessman, I’d face theft charges. Others among us want government to protect wild wolves, bears and the Stephens kangaroo rat even if it results in gross violations of private property and loss of lives. The problem is that some people disagree with having their earnings taken to satisfy someone else’s wishes. They don’t want the Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife Service dictating to them what they can and cannot do with their property to ensure a habitat for the kangaroo rat. Force and threats must be used. Here’s the question: Could the average American kill a person who resolutely refuses to give up his earnings so Congress can give it to farmers? Could you kill a person who insists on using all of his property, even though some wolves have set up a den on it? You say, “What do you mean, Williams— kill?” Here’s the scenario: The Corps of Engineers commands me not to remove debris from a drainage ditch on my property, placed there by beavers building a dam, because the debris creates a wetland. I remove it anyway. The Corps of Engineers fines me. I refuse to pay the unjust fine. The Corps of Engineers threatens to seize my land. I say no, you won’t: it’s my land, and I’ll protect it. A politician sends marshals to take it, and I get killed defending it.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
The path we’re embarked upon, in the name of good, is a familiar one. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism did not begin in the ‘30s and ‘40s with the men usually associated with those names. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to the consolidation of power in central government in the name of “social justice.” It was decent but misguided Germans, who would have cringed at the thought of extermination and genocide, who built the Trojan Horse for Hitler to take over. We Americans promote disrespect for our Constitution, rule of law and private property in our pursuit of “social justice.” But the scum that rises to the top has an agenda of command and control that’s leading toward totalitarianism. And, incidentally, it’s no coincidence that most of those at the top are lawyers -- people with a special, seemingly tutored, contempt for our Constitution and rule of law.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
In what sense are women equal to men? .... I’ve never seen sexually integrated professional boxing matches, football games, basketball games, 100-yard dashes or ice hockey games. Is that because male chauvinists deny women the chance to compete? The military response to the conspicuous absence of women in male-dominated areas suggests a remedy for professional sports. Army fitness standards call for 80 push-ups for men and 56 for women. Male soldiers ages 17 to 25 must run two miles in 17 minutes and 55 seconds. Females are given 22 minutes and 14 seconds. Male Marine trainees must climb 20 feet of rope in 30 seconds; women are given 50 seconds. The military’s “gender-norming” might be implemented in sports. In football, new rules might allow the offensive team’s female pass receiver to take up an uncovered position one-half the distance to the goal behind the defensive team’s line. In the 100-yard dash, women could get a 25-yard head start. In baseball, a mid-field hit might count as a home run. I’m at a loss for what can be done to gender-norm boxing. All that I come up with to level the playing field between a woman and George Foreman or Mike Tyson is to give the woman a gun. ... Feminists themselves wouldn’t want sports desegregated and gender-normed. The folly and disastrous consequences would be obvious to all. For them, gender-norming is best left to areas where its effects are more readily concealed. The fact of business is that we humans are not equal. Some of us are women and some are men. Some are smart and some are not so smart. Some are colored, others are uncolored. Some are tall, and some are short. Some of us are poor, and others wealthy. The differences -- inequalities -- are endless. Equality before the general rules of law is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty that can be secured without destroying liberty. It is an equality that neither requires nor assumes people are, in fact, equal. Our attempt to make people equal by rigging law to produce results destroys civility and generalized respect for the law. Government cannot create an advantage for one person without simultaneously creating a disadvantage for another. ... Government agencies have no right telling one American he or she can go into a business and another, who is just as able, that he or she cannot.
-- Walter E. Williams		 
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
-- Marianne Williamson		 
The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens.
-- Wendell L. Willkie		 
Whenever we take away the liberties of those whom we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.
-- Wendell L. Willkie		 
Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin.
-- Wendell L. Willkie		 
To suppress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress… Now more than ever, we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.
-- Wendell L. Willkie		 
The revulsion against war ... will be an almost insuperable obstacle for us to overcome. For that reason, I am convinced that we must begin now to set the machinery in motion for a permanent wartime economy.
-- Charles E. Wilson		 
The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.
-- Colin Wilson		 
The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.
-- Harold Wilson		 
Slavery, or an absolute and unlimited power in the master over the life and fortune of the slave, is unauthorized by the common law. Indeed, it is repugnant to the principles of natural law, that such a state should subsist in any social system. The reasons which we sometimes see assigned for the origin and the continuance of slavery appear, when examined to the bottom, to be built upon a false foundation. In the enjoyment of their persons and of their property, the common law protects all.
-- James Wilson		 
Every prudent and cautious judge ... will remember, that his duty and his business is, not to make the law, but to interpret and apply it.
-- James Wilson		 
Liberty and happiness have a powerful enemy on each hand; on the one hand tyranny, on the other licentiousness [anarchy]. To guard against the latter, it is necessary to give the proper powers to government; and to guard against the former, it is necessary that those powers should be properly distributed.
-- James Wilson		 
Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind.
-- James Wilson		 
The thirteen States are thirteen Sovereignties.
-- James Wilson		 
Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition.
-- James Q. Wilson		 
The benefits of the reading, writing and math does [sic] not outweigh the need for [black and white] children to learn to work and play together.
-- John Wilson		 
If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the others here for?
-- Robert Anton Wilson		 
To prohibit a citizen from wearing or carrying a war arm ... is an unwarranted restriction upon the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of constitutional privilege.
-- Wilson v. State		 
I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world. No longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.
-- Woodrow Wilson (Questionable)		 
The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
All over the Union, people are coming to feel that they have no control over the course of affairs... ‘We vote; we are offered the platform we want; we elect the men who stand on that platform; and we get absolutely nothing.’ So they begin to ask: ‘What is the use of voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction.’
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom -- is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end, and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
The world must be made safe for democracy.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Freedom exists only where the people take care of the government.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
I have always in my own thought summed up individual liberty, and business liberty, and every other kind of liberty, in the phrase that is common in the sporting world, 'A free field and no favor.'
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Government, in its last analysis, is organized force.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
There is such a thing as a nation being so right it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Liberty does not consist in mere declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government power, not the increase of it.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power, and to set up among the really free and self governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Liberty cannot live apart from constitutional
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
I have always been among those who believe that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
We have restricted credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development, and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world--no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of government. I do not expect monopoly to restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
The wisest thing to do with a fool is to encourage him to hire a hall and discourse to his fellow citizens. Nothing chills nonsense like exposure to air.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
The essential characteristic of all government, whatever its form, is authority. There must, in every instance, be, on the one hand, governors, and on the other hand, those who are governed. And the authority of governors, directly or indirectly, rest in all cases ultimately on FORCE. Government, in its last analysis, is organized force. Not necessarily or invariably organized, armed force, but the will of a few men, of many men, or of a community prepared by organization to realize its own purposes with reference to the common affairs of the community. Organized, that is, to rule, to dominate.
-- Woodrow Wilson		 
Primitive communism ... once existed among all peoples and still survives in many uncivilized countries.  All production in this stage of society is under the direction of chiefs or councils of elders.  No individual responsibility exists.
-- George Winder		 
There is little to be feared from the standard picture of a totalitarian society in which 'cogs,' who are watched by Big Brother or his equivalent, carry out orders emanating from the top. Such a society would collapse in inefficiency. What is infinitely more fearsome is the capacity of a dictatorship to use the principle of competition to organize terror and murder.
-- Ronald Wintrobe		 
The rights of all persons are wrapped in the same constitutional bundle as those of the most hated member of the community.
-- A. L. Wirin		 
The drafters of the Constitution clearly intended [the right of trial by jury] to protect the accused from oppression by the Government. Singer v. United States, 380 U.S. 24, 31, 85 S. Ct. 783, 788, 13 L. Ed. 2d 630 (1965). ... Part of this protection is embodied in the concept of jury nullification: “In criminal cases, a jury is entitled to acquit the defendant because it has no sympathy for the government’s position.” United States v. Wilson, 629 F.2d 439, 443 (6th Cir. 1980). The Founding Fathers knew that, absent jury nullification, judicial tyranny not only was a possibility, but was a reality in the colonial experience. Although we may view ourselves as living in more civilized times, there is obviously no reason to believe the need for this protection has been eliminated. Judicial and prosecutorial excesses still occur, and Congress is not yet an infallible body incapable of making tyrannical laws.
-- Judge Thomas Wiseman		 
[T]o deny a defendant of the possibility of jury nullification would be to defeat the central purpose of the jury system.
-- Judge Thomas A. Wiseman, Jr.		 
He is the best friend to American liberty, who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who set himself with the greatest firmness to bear down on profanity and immorality of every kind. Whoever is an avowed enemy of God, I scruple not to call him an enemy to his country.
-- John Witherspoon		 
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein		 
I must confess that the picture of the world that I have presented is unpleasant... If the picture of the world I have drawn is rather bleak, it could nonetheless be cataclysmically worse.
-- Albert Wohlstetter		 
Almost everyone seems concerned with the need to relax tension. However, relaxation of tension, which everyone thinks is good, is not easily distinguished from relaxing one's guard, which almost everyone thinks is bad. Relaxation, like Miltown, is not an end in itself. Not all danger comes from tension. The reverse relation, to be tense where there is danger, is only rational.
-- Albert Wohlstetter		 
We must contemplate some extremely unpleasant possibilities, just because we want to avoid them and achieve something better. Nobody, however, likes to think about anything unpleasant, even to avoid it. And so the crucial problem of thermonuclear war is frequently dispatched with the label 'War is unthinkable' -- which, translated freely, means we don't want to think about it.
-- Albert Wohlstetter		 
One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights.
-- Glenn Woiceshyn		 
The antipode of individualism is collectivism, which subordinates the individual to the group -- be it the 'community,' the tribe, the race, the proletariat, etc. A person's moral worth is judged by how much he sacrifices himself to the group. [Under collectivism] the more emergencies (and victims) the better, because they provide more opportunity for 'virtue'.
-- Glenn Woiceshyn		 
One byproduct of individualism is benevolence -- a general attitude of good will towards one's neighbors and fellow human beings. Benevolence is impossible in a society where people violate each others' rights.
-- Glenn Woiceshyn		 
By the end of this decade we will live under the first One World Government that has ever existed in the society of nations...a government with absolute authority to decide the basic issues of survival. One world government is inevitable.
-- Karl Wojtyla		 
Since direct political discussion was prohibited, all literature tended to become a criticism of Russian life, and literary criticism but another form of social criticism… If the censor forbade explicit statement, he was skillfully eluded by indirection – by innocent seeming tales of other lands or times, by complicated parables, animal fables, double meanings, overtones, by investing apparently trivial events with the pent-up energies possessing the writer, so that the reader became compelled to dwell upon them until their hidden meanings became manifest.
-- Bertram Wolfe		 
America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is about as useless as a miniskirt in a convent.
-- Claire Wolfe		 
Like ‘em or hate ‘em, these once peaceful gun owners of the ‘90s are feeling a lot like Jews of 1939 Germany. Maligned, lied about, persecuted and threatened. Afraid, confused and angry.
-- Claire Wolfe		 
America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is about as useless as a miniskirt in a convent. ... Something’s eventually going to happen. Government will bloat until it chokes us to death, or one more tyrannical power grab will turn out to be one too many. ... Maybe it’ll be one more round of “reasonable gun control” or one more episode of burning children to death to save them from “child abuse.” Whatever, something will snap.
-- Claire Wolfe		 
You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.
-- Humbert Wolfe		 
It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.
-- Thomas Wolfe		 
When you disarm peaceful citizens, crime and violence explode..
-- Jarret Wollstein		 
In Washington, D.C. it costs $7,000 in city fees to open a pushcart. In California, up to eighty federal and state licenses are required to open a small business. In New York, a medallion to operate a taxicab costs $150,000. More than 700 occupations in the United States require a government license. Throughout the country, church soup kitchens for the homeless are being closed by departments of health. No wonder so many people turn to crime and violence to survive.
-- Jarret B. Wollstein		 
Collectivism is the doctrine that the social collective -- called society, the people, the state, etc. -- has rights, needs, or moral authority above and apart from the individuals who comprise it. We hear this idea continually championed in such familiar platitudes as 'the needs of the people take precedence over the rights of the individual,' 'production for people, not profits,' and 'the common good.'  Collectivism often sounds humane because it stresses the importance of human needs. In reality, it is little more than a rationalization for sacrificing you and me to the desires of others.
-- Jarret B. Wollstein		 
Prosperity requires liberty: to be productive we must be free.
-- Jarret B. Wollstein		 
I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.
-- Mary Wollstonecraft		 
Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.
-- John Wooden		 
Where would we be if we had I.O.U.'s scrip and certificates floating all around the country?" Instead he decided to "issue currency against the sound assets of the banks. [As opposed to issuing currency against gold.] The Federal Reserve Act lets us print all we'll need. And it won't frighten the people. It won't look like stage money. It'll be money that looks like real money.
-- William Hartman Woodin		 
You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims.
-- Harriet Woods		 
The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.
-- C. Van Woodward		 
Above all, every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university. No member has a right to prevent such expression. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed.
-- C. Van Woodward		 
To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views.
-- C. Van Woodward		 
Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
-- Virginia Woolf		 
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
-- Virginia Woolf		 
To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.
-- Virginia Woolf		 
To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
-- Virginia Woolf		 
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
-- Virginia Woolf		 
I'm tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn't work. Of course it doesn't work. We are supposed to work it.
-- Alexander Woollcott		 
Man free, man working for himself, with choice of time, place, and object.
-- William Wordsworth		 
When Andrew Carnegie established The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he gave the managers of this fund a difficult task. How were they to go about promoting peace? They seem to have had no very clear idea until Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler … got excited about the peril of the Allies in World War I and decided that the best way to establish peace was to help get the United States into the War. To this end he began to use the Endowment funds.
-- Rene A. Wormser		 
Is there any means known to man more effective than war, assuming you want to alter the life of an entire people? At the end of the year, they came to the conclusion that there was no more effective means to that end known to man. So, then they raised question number two, and the question was, “How do we involve the United States in a war?”
-- Rene A. Wormser		 
The Council on Foreign Relations, another member of the international complex, financed by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, overwhelmingly propagandizes the globalist concept. This organization became virtually an agency of the government when World War II broke out. The Rockefeller Foundation had started and financed certain studies known as the War and Peace Studies, manned largely by associates of the Council; the State Department, in due course, took these studies over, retaining the major personnel which the Council on Foreign Relations had supplied.
-- Rene A. Wormser		 
Remember this, if you can. There is nothing more precious than time. You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you have not. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end, only in the end it becomes more obvious.
-- Herman Wouk		 
An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth, or it is an error; it can never be a crime or a virtue.
-- Frances Wright		 
It will appear evident upon attentive consideration that equality of intellectual and physical advantages is the only sure foundation of liberty, and that such equality may best, and perhaps only, be obtained by a union of interests and cooperation in labor.
-- Frances Wright		 
Persecution for opinion is the master vice of society.
-- Frances Wright		 
A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright		 
The truth is more important than the facts.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright		 
It perhaps goes without saying that the ‘average’ gun owner and the ‘average’ criminal are worlds apart in background, social outlooks, and economic circumstances. The idea that common, ordinary citizens are somehow transformed into potential perpetrators of criminally violent acts once they have acquired a firearm seems farfetched, most of all since there is substantial evidence that the typical gun owner is affluent, Protestant, and middle-class.
-- James D. Wright		 
It is ironical that the only nation which affirmatively expresses a dependence upon and belief in Almighty God in its birth certificate, should now be in mortal combat for its very existence with a godless conspiracy intent upon conquering the world, and reverting human society to the hazards and indignities of the Dark Ages.
-- Loyd Wright		 
Ladies and Gentlemen, we only pass laws against people who obey the law. Drug dealers, bank robbers and rapists don’t care what we do because they willfully violate the law anyway.
-- Rod Wright		 
To disregard such a deliberate choice of words and their natural meaning, would be a departure from the first principle of constitutional interpretation. "In expounding the Constitution of the United States," said Chief Justice Taney in Holmes v. Jennison, 14 U.S. 540, 570-1, "every word must have its due force and appropriate meaning; for it is evident from the whole instrument, that, no word was unnecessarily used, or needlessly added. The many discussions which have taken place upon the construction of the Constitution, have proved the correctness of this proposition; and shown the high talent, the caution and the foresight of the illustrious men who framed it. Every word appears to have been weighed with the utmost deliberation and its force and effect to have been fully understood.
-- Wright v. United States		 
Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated. Capital is not just money. It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they are well treated.
-- Walter Wriston		 
[Each member government]...shall ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations, and administrative procedures with its obligations [to the World Trade Organization].
-- WTO Charter		 
The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft.
-- Philip Wylie		 
Absolute, arbitrary power over the lives, liberty and property of freemen exists nowhere in a republic, not even in the largest majority.
-- Wyoming Declaration of Rights Art. I, Sec. 7		 
Power never takes a back step -- only in the face of more power.
-- Malcolm X		 
You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
-- Malcolm X		 
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
-- Malcolm X		 

-- xAltruism-done		 
Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards.
-- Francis Xavier		 

-- xbible		 

-- XCollectivism		 

-- xFreedom		 

-- xIndividualism		 

-- xLaw		 

-- xMedia		 

-- xMonopoly		 

-- xNext2012		 

-- xNextOne		 

-- xSex		 

-- xTax		 

-- xxDrug		 

-- xxEconomy		 

-- xxJustice		 

-- xxLawyer		 

-- xxLiberty		 

-- xxLiberty		 

-- xxNext1-done		 

-- xxNextSelect		 

-- xxObscenity		 

-- xxPsychology		 

-- xxSelf-Sufficiency		 

-- xxTax		 

-- xxtemp		 

-- xxxJustice		 

-- xxxMoney-Import-DONE		 

-- xxxQuotes		 

-- xxxReligion		 

-- xzTaxHonor		 
President Bush told Congress on Wednesday to “untie the hands” of law enforcement officials and arm them with wider legal powers to combat terrorists, saying the groups that struck America two years ago are wounded but still dangerous. He specifically called for expanding use of the federal death penalty, tougher bail restrictions and greater subpoena powers. … Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said all three provisions Bush highlighted were included in a draft sequel to the Patriot Act that was made public earlier this year. “What’s relevant is that President Bush is trying to push through these powers that the Justice Department put together as a sequel to the Patriot Act in a way that further undermines civil rights and civil liberties,” Edgar said.
-- Yahoo News		 
Police State: A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force.
-- Yahooligans Reference		 
The right of the jury to decide questions of law was widely recognized in the colonies. In 1771, John Adams stated unequivocally that a juror should ignore a judge’s instruction on the law if it violates fundamental principles: “It is not only ... [the juror’s] right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.” There is much evidence of the general acceptance of this principle in the period immediately after the Constitution was adopted.
-- Yale Law Journal		 
Academic freedom means the right, long accepted in the academic world, to study, discuss, and write about facts and ideas without restrictions, other than those imposed by conscience and morality.
-- Yale University		 
A military man can scarcely pride himself on having 'smitten a sleeping enemy'; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack.
-- Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto		 
The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants.
-- Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto		 
It is always a part of the misfortunes of the vanquished that their portraits are painted and their history written by the victors.
-- A. Yankee		 
An individual should not have too much freedom. A nation should have absolute freedom.
-- Sun Yat-sen		 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
-- W.B. Yeats		 
One day posterity will remember these strange times, when ordinary common honesty was called courage.
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko		 
A half truth is a whole lie.
-- Yiddish Proverb		 
Give a man secure possession of a bleak rock and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years lease of a garden and he will turn it into a desert.
-- Arthur Young		 
Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care. ... It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record.
-- Judge Francis L. Young		 
The power of the Right is principle, and the principle of the Left is power. Understand this and you will understand the basis of modern politics.
-- J.T. Young		 
Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
-- Lin Yutang		 
It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one's private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation's moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? .... The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil.
-- Dr. Ravi Zacharias		 
Words are the pen of the heart, but music is the pen of the soul.
-- Shueur Zalman		 
America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming.
-- Israel Zangwill		 
Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.
-- Frank Zappa		 
Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it... Rise for the flag salute.
-- Frank Zappa		 
Asked random questions about the First Amendment and how they would like to have it applied, if you believe in polls at all, the average American wants no part of it. But if you ask, 'What if we threw the Constitution away tomorrow?' the answer is 'No, that would be bad!' But living under the Constitution is another story altogether.
-- Frank Zappa		 
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
-- Frank Zappa		 
Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.
-- Frank Zappa		 
Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
-- Frank Zappa		 
Rock music was never written for or performed for conservative tastes.
-- Frank Zappa		 
Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not truth; Truth is not beauty; Beauty is not love; Love is not music; Music is the best.
-- Frank Zappa		 
If lyrics make people do things, how come we don't love each other?
-- Frank Zappa		 
Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.
-- Frank Zappa		 
Government is the Entertainment Division of the military-industrial complex.
-- Frank Zappa		 
Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.
-- Frank Zappa		 
The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
-- Frank Zappa		 
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
-- Frank Zappa		 
You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline -- it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
-- Frank Zappa		 
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
-- Frank Zappa		 
I am thought. I can see what the eyes cannot see. I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel. Yet I create Beauty for the eyes, Music for the ears, Love for the heart. They, ignorant of their ignorance, call me cold. Barren of Sight. Barren of Sound. Barren of Feeling. But it is I who am from which all comes. Given to the ungrateful. Unseen. Unheard. Unfelt.
-- Peter Zarlenga		 
I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either.
-- Edward Zehr		 
No nation, ancient or modern, ever lost the liberty of speaking freely, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.
-- John Peter Zenger		 
The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the suppression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is the best preservative of the whole.
-- John Peter Zenger		 
Prejudice rarely survives experience.
-- Eve Zibart		 
Since they have dared, I too shall dare. I shall tell the truth because I pledged myself to tell it if justice regularly empowered did not do so fully, unmitigated. My duty is to speak; I have no wish to be an accomplice.
-- Emile Zola		 
Duct tape is like 'the Force'. It has a light side, and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
-- Carl Zwanzig		 

-- zxnext		 

-- zxxxCanada_Books		 

-- zxy		 

-- zxzxzx		 
A family member asked my wife, "Aren't you concerned about his (our son's) socialization with other kids?" My wife gave this response: "Go to your local middle school, junior high, or high school, walk down the hallways, and tell me which behavior you see that you think our son should emulate.
-- Manfred B. Zysk		 

-- zz		 

-- zzCFR		 

-- zzComputer		 

-- zzEconomics		 

-- zzeducation		 

-- zzMilitia		 

-- zzNext-ArmsJury		 

-- zzzArms		 

-- zzzBanking-Ready		 

-- zzzBigOne		 

-- zzzEducation NWO		 

-- zzzHonesty		 

-- zzzLiberty-Ready		 

-- zzzNextBigImport		 

-- zzzNWO		 

-- zzzResponsibility		 

-- zzzTaxes-Done		 

-- zzzWoorden		 

-- zzzz		 

-- zzzz		 

-- zzzz		 

-- zzzzAgnostic		 

-- zzzzJesus		 

-- zzzzNWO		 

-- zzzzNWO		 

-- zzzzSpeech		 

-- zzzzx-Done		 

-- zzzzz-Done		 

-- zzzzzzy-done		 


Daily Quotes
Ready to be inspired?
Sign up for a daily dose of Liberty Quotes!
Leave us your email address to subscribe.
Email:

Here's the Daily Quote history.

Browse quotes by
Authors, Categories,
and Cryptograms!



The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
A classic since 1953 with over 20,000 quotes from over 3,000 authors.


Famous Last Words
Apt Observations, Pleas, Curses, Benedictions, Sour Notes, Bons Mots, and Insights from People on the Brink of Departure


Stretch Your Wings
Famous Black Quotations for the Young


American Quotations
An exhaustive collection of profound quotes from the founding fathers, presidents, statesmen, scientists, constitutions, court decisions


The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations


Last Words of Saints and Sinners
700 Final Quotes from the Famous, the Infamous, and the Inspiring Figures of History


America's God and Country: Encyclopedia of Quotations
Contains over 2,100 profound quotations from founding fathers, presidents, constitutions, court decisions and more


The Law
This 1850 classic is an absolute must read for anyone interested in law, justice, truth, or liberty. A most compelling and revolutionary look at The Law.


Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition)


The Stupidest Things Ever Said by Politicians
Rise up, America -- and laugh out loud at the greatest gaffes that no spin doctor could possibly fix!


The 776 Even Stupider Things Ever Said
Another great collection of stupidity


Quotable Quotes
Wit and Wisdom for All Occasions from America's Most Popular Magazine


The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time
You don't have to be a genius to sound like one. Here's a collection of the most profound and provocative wit and wisdom in the English language in two lines or less.


2,715 One-Line Quotations for Speakers, Writers & Raconteurs
Invaluable sampler of witticisms, epigrams, sayings, bon mots, platitudes and insights chosen for their brevity and pithiness.


Phillips' Book of Great Thoughts Funny Sayings
A stupendous collection of quotes, quips, epigrams, witticisms, and humorous comments for personal enjoyment and ready reference.


Quick Quips and Quotes; 532 Things I Wish I Had Said
Quick Quips and Quotes is the Ultimate Collection of one liners.


Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes
The ultimate anthology of anecdotes, now revised with over 700 new entries.


Quotations for Public Speakers
A Historical, Literary, and Political Anthology


Liberty - The American Revolution
This compelling series traces the events leading up to the war and America's fight for freedom.


Founding Fathers
The story of how these disparate characters fomented rebellion in the colonies, formed the Continental Congress, fought the Revolutionary War, and wrote the Constitution


Libertarianism: A Primer
David Boaz, director of the Cato Institute, has written a simple introduction to Libertarianism inteneded to appeal to disgruntled Democrats and Republicans everywhere.


The Libertarian Reader
Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman


Thomas Paine: Collected Writings
All the classics: Common Sense / The Crisis / Rights of Man / The Age of Reason / Pamphlets, Articles, and Letters


(c) Copyright 1999-2024