Famous Quotations / Quotes
Famous Quotes about Liberty
 

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

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

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

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

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

-- Sol Bloom
 
Government should not tell you what to do unless there's a compelling public purpose.
-- Michael Bloomberg
 
A free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought.
-- Leon Blum
 
Morality may consist solely in the courage of making a choice.
-- Léon Blum
 
What is so mind boggling is that all of this is being financed by the American people themselves through their own taxes. In other words, the American people are underwriting the destruction of their own freedom and way of life by lavishly financing through federal and state grants the very social scientists who are undermining our national sovereignty and preparing our children to become the dumbed-down vassals of the new world order.
-- Samuel L. Blumenfeld
 
When we think of the past, we forget the fools and remember the sage. We reverse the process for our own time.
-- George Boas
 
The real reason to abolish departments like Energy and Education is not to promote efficiency, nor even to save taxpayers’ money. It is that many agencies perform functions that are not Federal responsibility. The founders delegated to the Government only strictly defined authority in Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution. Search the entire Constitution, and you will find no authorization for Congress to subsidize the arts, finance and regulate education or invest tax revenues in energy research.
-- David Boaz
 
Maybe that's because guns are sold at a profit, while schools are provided by the government.
-- David Boaz
 
American [public] schools are failing because they are organized according to a bureaucratic, monopolistic model; their organizing principle is basically the same as that of a socialist economy.
-- David Boaz
 
Power always corrupts, and the power of government to tell people how to live their lives or to transfer money from those who earn it to others is always a temptation to corruption. Taxes and regulations reduce people’s incentive to produce wealth, and government transfer programs reduce people’s incentive to work, to save, and to help family and friends in case of sickness, disability, or retirement. ...[I]t is nonetheless clear that government enterprises are less efficient, less innovative, and more wasteful than private firms.... [C]ompare what it’s like to call American Express versus the IRS to correct problems. Or compare a private apartment building with public housing.
-- David Boaz
 
The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That’s enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce’s office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services.
-- Alan Bock
 
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.\\ You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.\\ You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.\\ You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.\\ You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.\\ You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.\\ You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.\\ You cannot establish security on borrowed money.\\ You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.\\ You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
-- William Boetcker
 
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
-- Niels Bohr
 
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
-- Niels Bohr
 
Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.
-- Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
 
In the whole history of law and order, the biggest step was taken by primitive man when...the tribe sat in a circle and allowed only one man to speak at a time. An accused who is shouted down has no rights whatever.
-- Curtis Bok
 
It will be asked whether one would care to have one's young daughter read these books. I suppose that by the time she is old enough to wish to read them she will have learned the biologic facts of life and the words that go with them. There is something seriously wrong at home if those facts have not been met and faced and sorted by then; it is not children so much as parents that should receive our concern about this. I should prefer that my own three daughters meet the facts of life and the literature of the world in my library than behind a neighbor's barn, for I can face the adversary there directly. If the young ladies are appalled by what they read, they can close the book at the bottom of page one; if they read further, they will learn what is in the world and in its people, and no parents who have been discerning with their children need fear the outcome. Nor can they hold it back, for life is a series of little battles and minor issues, and the burden of choice is on us all, every day, young and old
-- Judge Curtis Bok
 
Some people are calling for the federal government to restrict the right to keep and bear arms of people who are on the federal government’s terrorism watch list. This is not only unconstitutional, but sets an extremely dangerous precedent for all our rights. If the federal government can take away someone else’s right to defend themselves simply because it has unilaterally decided to place them on a secret, wildly inaccurate list that’s virtually impossible to be removed from, eventually, some bureaucrat is going to find some way to put you on that list for another reason.
-- Michael Boldin
 
Whatever power you give politicians and bureaucrats to use against other people will eventually be used by future politicians and bureaucrats against you.
-- Michael Boldin
 
Not one cent should be raised unless it is in accord with the law.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes… Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
While I live I will never resort to irredeemable paper.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of people would die for Him.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
I want a situation without censorship, because I do not want to be responsible for whatever they may say.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
 
I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.
-- Kit Bond
 
From the rostrum of the United Nations, we shall convince the colonial and semicolonial people to liberate themselves and to spread the Communist theory all over the world.
-- Soviet General Pantelei Bondarenko
 
The trouble with gold is that it turns its back on world improvers, empire builders and do-gooders.
-- Bill Bonner
 
The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn't have on things he doesn't need -- we're done for.
-- Bill Bonner
 
Whose service is perfect freedom.
-- Book of Common Prayer
 
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
-- Daniel Boorstin
 
Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful.
-- Neal Boortz
 
I can’t think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be.
-- Neal Boortz
 
You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'
-- Neal Boortz
 
Why is it when times get rough only the people have to look for ways to cut back?  Why is this always just absolutely impossible for government?
-- Neal Boortz
 
Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one.  Once again -- the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states.  Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches.  You won’t find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years.
-- Neal Boortz
 
THE most widespread form of child abuse in the United States is parents' sending children to the government to be educated.
-- Neal Boortz
 
How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?
-- Neal Boortz
 
This kind of rhetoric should be familiar to any who lived through the McCarthy era of the 1950s. It allows for no differences, not agreement to disagree, among adults or children.
-- David Booth
 
No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right.
-- William E. Borah
 
Who could impose such socialistic confiscatory rates?
-- William E. Borah
 
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
-- William E. Borah
 
Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen.
-- William E. Borah
 
Social Security is an unfunded pay-as-you-go system, fundamentally flawed and analogous in design to illegal pyramid schemes. Government accounting creates the illusion of a trust fund, but in fact, excess receipts are spent immediately. The government’s own actuaries predict the system will be bankrupt by 2030, but Social Security could face financial crisis as early as 2014. Moreover, Social Security’s relatively poor rate of return makes the program an increasingly worse investment for today’s young worker. ... The system design itself is fundamentally flawed and cannot be repaired. It must instead be replaced by one derived from free markets and operated by free citizenry making individual economic decisions in their own self-interest. ... Reform is long overdue. If we fail to act soon, our children will either inherit a bankrupt system or be forced to pay an impossibly high level of taxes. Only private pensions with individual property rights to accumulate fund balances can create a secure pension system. Chile, which privatized its system in 1981, provides evidence of such a system’s effectiveness.
-- Karl Borden
 
If a state militia guarantee rather than an individual right of citizens to keep and bear arms were the purpose of the second Amendment, it would have been totally unnecessary and irrelevant to include any guarantee of “the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” since by its very nature a militia is necessarily an armed force and without arms it would be impossible to carry out its constitutional functions of suppressing insurrections and repelling invasions.
-- Bernard J. Bordonet
 
Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.
-- Dr. Jim Boren
 
Every bureaucrat has a constitutional right to fuzzify, profundify and drivelate. It's a part of our freedom of speech...If people can understand what is being said in Washington, they might want to take over their own government again.
-- Dr. Jim Boren
 
Public apathy is more powerful than public opinion. There's more of it.
-- Dr. Jim Boren
 
When in charge, ponder... When in trouble, delegate... When in doubt, mumble.
-- Dr. Jim Boren
 
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
-- Jorge Luis Borges
 
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
-- Jorge Luis Borges
 
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
-- Jorge Luis Borges
 
As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago.
-- Judge Robert Bork
 
The American press is extraordinarily free and vigorous, as it should be. It should be, not because it is free of inaccuracy, oversimplification and bias, but because the alternative to that freedom is worse than those failings.
-- Judge Robert Bork
 
[A] society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable.
-- Robert Bork
 
I don't think the Constitution is studied almost anywhere, including law schools. In law schools, what they study is what the court said about the Constitution. They study the opinions. They don't study the Constitution itself.
-- Robert Bork
 
Only the suppressed word is dangerous.
-- Ludwig Börne
 
A functioning police state needs no police.
-- William S. Borroughs
 
This country is not pro-American. It is United States property.
-- Juan Bosch
 
Who lies for you will lie against you.
-- Bosnian Proverb
 
[It is] a natural Right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the [English] Bill of rights, to keep arms for their own defense; and as Mr. Blackstone observes, it is to be made use of when the sanctions of Society and law are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression.
-- Boston Evening Post
 
When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover that check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money.
-- Boston Federal Reserve Bank
 
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
-- James Boswell
 
Firearms, especially long guns, occupy a noble place in Canadian history since they are no doubt responsible for the exploitation of a vast and wild territory that had long remained untouched. From 1534 until 1979 (!), the importance of firearms remained uncontested. More than a simple tool of everyday life, they became truly a phenomenon of civilization. At all times and whoever he was, the Canadian was directly in contact with firearms, and he cannot be imagined otherwise. Even today, this symbol of liberty remains intimately related to wide, open spaces, and to a tolerant society. It is the distinctive mark of today's and yesterday's America. Here, in New France, let's repeat it, it is not only soldiers and nobles who have the possibility or privilege to bear arms. Century-old Canadian customs recognize equally to everybody the legal and moral right to acquire a firearm and to use it freely and noncoercively.
-- Russel Bouchard
 
Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.
-- Elias Boudinot
 
Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.
-- Kenneth Boulding
 
A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.
-- Kenneth Boulding
 
Ideas are to literature what light is to painting.
-- Paul Bourget
 
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society these irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.
-- Randolph Bourne
 
War is the health of the State.
-- Randolph Bourne
 
Every ambitious would-be empire clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie, and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it! ... If America ever does seek Empire, and most nations do, then planned reforms in our domestic life will be abandoned, States Rights will be abolished -- in order to impose a centralized government upon us for the purpose of internal repudiation of freedom, and adventures abroad. The American Dream will then die -- on battlefields all over the world -- and a nation conceived in liberty will destroy liberty for Americans and impose tyranny on subject nations.
-- George S. Boutwell
 
To blindly trust government is to automatically vest it with excessive power. To distrust government is simply to trust humanity - to trust in the ability of average people to peacefully, productively coexist without some official policing their every move. The State is merely another human institution - less creative than Microsoft, less reliable than Federal Express, less responsible than the average farmer husbanding his land, and less prudent than the average citizen spending his own paycheck.
-- James Bovard
 
Its contempt for citizens ... is so routine, and so unlimited, that the agency has become a kind of Frankenstein, running wild and terrorizing Americans at will. The IRS hypocritically requires mistake-free returns when its own books are in shambles. It demands exorbitant sums of money without regard to the accuracy of its claims. It doesn’t hesitate to use every possible maneuver to get what it wants, sometimes destroying businesses -- and lives -- in the process.
-- James Bovard
 
As we learned from the Clinton administration and much of the media, a machine gun in the hands of a federal agent is now a symbol of benevolence and concern for a child's well-being.
-- James Bovard
 
The people = government doctrine is equivalent to political infantilism -- an agreement to pretend that the citizen's wishes animate each restriction or exaction inflicted upon him.
-- James Bovard
 
Subsidies entail politicians’ taking the citizen’s paycheck and then using it to buy his submission.
-- James Bovard
 
Assault weapons laws resemble hate speech laws. Hate speech laws usually begin by targeting a few words that almost no one approves. Once the system for controlling and punishing “hate speech” is put into place, there is little or nothing to stop it from expanding to punish more and more types of everyday speech. Similarly, once an assault weapons law is on the books, there is little to prevent politicians from vastly increasing the number of weapons banned under the law. The main effect of banning assault weapons is to give government an excuse to arrest and imprison millions of Americans while doing little or nothing to reduce crime. America has a limited number of police, and politicians must decide who the real public enemies are. If Mr. Clinton signs an assault weapons ban, it could signal the start of an attack on gun owners’ constitutional rights that could far surpass all previous gun bans.
-- James Bovard
 
The first step in saving our liberty is to realize how much we have already lost, how we lost it, and how we will continue to lose it unless fundamental political changes occur.
-- James Bovard
 
However accurate or inaccurate the agency’s numbers may be, tax law explicitly presumes that the IRS is always right -- and implicitly presumes that the taxpayer is always wrong -- in any dispute with the government. In many cases, the IRS introduces no evidence whatsoever of its charges; it merely asserts that a taxpayer had a certain amount of unreported income and therefore owes a proportionate amount in taxes, plus interest and penalties.
-- James Bovard
 
No-knock police raids destroy Americans’ right to privacy and safety. People’s lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants. ... Unfortunately, no-knock raids are becoming more common as federal, state, and local politicians and law enforcement agencies decide that the war on drugs justified nullifying the Fourth Amendment. ... No-knock raids in response to alleged narcotics violations presume that the government should have practically unlimited power to endanger some people’s lives in order to control what others ingest.
-- James Bovard
 
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
-- James Bovard
 
Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians.
-- Chester Bowles
 
The government expands at will, based on what might be charitably called flimsy constitutional reasoning and less charitably and more accurately called arrogant judicial tyranny. Government authority these days rarely comes from the Constitution as written but from the last carefully crafted misinterpretation of it. This is called legal precedent.
-- Linda Bowles
 
The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice.
-- Linda Bowles
 
The cause of freedom is the cause of God.
-- William Lisle Bowles
 
This [audit] was made extremely difficult because [IRS] existing Systems were not designed to provide reliable financial information... on their operations.
-- Charles A. Bowsher
 
Constitutional provisions for the security of person and property should be liberally construed. It is the duty of the courts to be watchful of constitutional rights against any stealthy encroachments thereon.
-- Boyd v. U.S.
 
If all were to share alike, and all were to do alike, then all were on an equality throughout, and one was as good as another; and so, if it did not actually abolish those very relations which God himself has set among men, it did at least greatly diminish the mutual respect that is so important should be preserved amongst them. Let none argue that this is due to human failing, rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself....
-- William Bradford
 
The experience that was had in ... the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth ... was found to breed much confusion and discontent; and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit.... For the young men that were most able and fit for labor and service objected that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children, without any recompense.... The strong man or the resourceful man had no more share of food, clothes, etc., than the weak man who was not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men, who were ranked and equalized in labor, food, clothes, etc., with the meaner and younger ones, thought it some indignity and disrespect to them.
-- William Bradford
 
Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful. Better a thousand fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people.
-- Charles Bradlaugh
 
If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of human kind.
-- Charles Bradlaugh
 
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
-- General Omar Bradley
 
In a small Swiss city sits an international organization so obscure and secretive....Control of the institution, the Bank for International Settlements, lies with some of the world's most powerful and least visible men: the heads of 32 central banks, officials able to shift billions of dollars and alter the course of economies at the stroke of a pen.
-- Keith Bradsher
 
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
-- Anne Bradstreet
 
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
-- Anne Bradstreet
 
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
-- Anne Bradstreet
 
Our task of creating a socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us have been totally disarmed.
-- Sarah Brady (False)
 
I honestly believe that sound commercialism is the best test of true value in art. People work hard for their money and if they won’t part with it for your product the chances are that your product hasn’t sufficient value. An artist or writer hasn’t any monopoly .... If the public response to his artistry is lacking, he’d do well to spend more time analyzing what’s the matter with his work, and less time figuring what’s the matter with the public.
-- Berton Braley
 
Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
Most of the things worth doing in the world have been declared impossible before they were done.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen... If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
'Stare decisis' is usually the wise policy.... [b]ut where correction through legislative action is practically impossible, this Court has often overruled its earlier decisions...
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
[The founding fathers] conferred, as against the Government, the right to be left alone -- the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
The makers of our constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness... They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
They: The makers of the Constitution: conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is an opportunity for full discussion. Only an emergency can justify repression.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
In the frank expression of conflicting opinions lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system, that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
The most important political office is that of private citizen.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
-- Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 
A depression is a large-scale decline in production and trade... there is nothing in the nature of a free-market economy to cause such an event.
-- Nathaniel Branden
 
The policy of seeking values from human beings by means of force, when practiced by an individual, is called crime. When practiced by a government, it is called statism ...
-- Nathaniel Branden
 
Individualism is at once an ethical-psychological concept and an ethical-political one. As an ethical-psychological concept, individualism holds that a human being should think and judge independently, respecting nothing more than the sovereignty of his or her mind; thus, it is intimately connected with the concept of autonomy. As an ethical-political concept, individualism upholds the supremacy of individual rights ...
-- Nathaniel Branden
 
Force, governmental coercion, is the instrument by which the ethics of altruism -- the belief that the individual exists to serve others -- is translated into political reality.
-- Nathaniel Branden
 
As teachers, we enter the minds of others; thus we live in eternity. We help others live better lives, thus teaching remains a mercy.
-- Dr. Paul F. Brandwein
 
Every child who believes in God is mentally ill.
-- Dr. Paul F. Brandwein (False)
 
Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.
-- Robert Brault
 
There is no wisdom without knowledge.
-- Tom Braun
 
If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom.
-- Tom Braun
 
Those who take the most from the table, teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined, demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill, speak to the hungry, of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss, call ruling difficult, for ordinary folk.
-- Bertolt Brecht
 
Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came? Why then, the war would come to you!
-- Bertolt Brecht
 
All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance – unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion, have the full protection of the guarantees [of the First Amendment].
-- Justice William J. Brennan
 
The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to “create” rights. Rather they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.
-- Justice William J. Brennan
 
The door of the Free Exercise Clause stands tightly closed against any government regulation of religious beliefs as such. Government may neither compel affirmation of a repugnant belief, nor penalize or discriminate against individuals or groups because they hold views abhorrent to the authorities.
-- Justice William J. Brennan
 
There is no such thing as a false idea.
-- Justice William J. Brennan
 
If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
-- Justice William J. Brennan
 
The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism.
-- Justice William J. Brennan
 
If there is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
-- Justice William J. Brennan
 
Historians and economists are very good at creating and perpetuating myths that justify increasing the power placed in the hands of government.
-- Reuven Brenner
 
Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure.
-- Kingman Brewster
 
And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens, [President Trump] could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control what people think. And that, that is our job.
-- Mika Brezinski
 
No man has ever been born a Negro hater, a Jew hater, or any other kind of hater. Nature refuses to be involved in such suicidal practices.
-- Harry Bridges
 
Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government.
-- Robert Briffault
 
Force is not a remedy.
-- John Bright
 
I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
 
To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
 
I waited and waited, and when no message came, I knew it must have been from you.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
 
By doing just a little every day, I can gradually let the task completely overwhelm me.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
 
It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
-- David Brin
 
The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.
-- David Brinkley
 
Anybody that wants the Presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
-- David Broder
 
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.
-- Jacob Bronowski
 
But while capitalism may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism.
-- Yaron Brook
 
. . . for righteous monarchs, Justly to judge, with their own eyes should see; To rule o'er freemen, should themselves be free.
-- Henry Brooke
 
Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool.
-- Bellamy Brooks
 
I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk.
-- Dr. Joyce Brothers
 
Free speech is about as good a cause as the world has ever known. But it…gets shoved aside in favor of things which at a given moment more vital…everybody favors free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground.
-- Heywood Broun
 
The censor believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For after all, it is life with which he quarrels.
-- Heywood Broun
 
The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice so pleasurable that I assume it must be evil.
-- Heywood Hale Broun
 
Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will turn vegetarian.
-- Heywood Hale Broun
 
The American communists worked energetically and tirelessly to lay the foundations for the United Nations which we were sure would come into existence. … It can be said, without exaggeration, that ever closer relations between our nation and the Soviet Union are an unconditional requirement for the United Nations as a world coalition. … The United Nations is the instrument for victory. Victory is required for the survival of our nation. The Soviet Union is an essential part of the United Nations. Mutual confidence between our country and the Soviet Union and joint work in the leadership of the United Nations are absolutely necessary.
-- Earl Browder
 
Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
-- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
 
People take different roads seeking fulfillment & happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost.
-- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
 
Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority.
-- James A. C. Brown
 
There exists a “fear of freedom” of selfhood, which makes people want to submerge themselves in the mass and confession is one of the obvious means by which they can do so, for thereby they lose those traits which cause them to feel separate.
-- James A. C. Brown
 
The quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy is understandable [...] There is only one problem with this approach. We are a court.
-- Justice Janice Brown
 
As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization [in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence.
-- Jerry Brown
 
Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense.
-- Norman O. Brown
 
[T]he best elements of the national and state bars are seriously and energetically working for practical reforms in legal procedure, in the manner of the selection of judges, and in the prevention of delays and against the miscarriage of justice, and this, too, by feasible and constitutional measures and by every constructive and really progressive method which can be devised; and that the fact that satisfactory remedies have not yet been attained, is not the fault of the bench or of the bar, whose leaders have for years been urging upon the people, through the legislatures, fully formulated and efficient remedial measures. The fault lies with the people themselves, whose direct representatives in the legislatures, national and state, refuse properly to consider and act upon proposed laws of authenticated and undeniable efficacy.
-- Rome G. Brown
 
The free market punishes irresponsibility. Government rewards it.
-- Harry Browne
 
You can't give the government the power to do good without also giving it the power to do bad - in fact, to do anything it wants.
-- Harry Browne
 
Being a politician means never having to say you're sorry. You don't have to say, 'I never should have voted to subsidize that ridiculous Enron project in India.' ... After all, they're greedy businessmen and you're a selfless public servant.
-- Harry Browne
 
For those looking for security, be forewarned that there's nothing more insecure than a political promise.
-- Harry Browne
 
The press is hostile to the idea of liberty.  Most people in the press are for big government.  Most people think that the solution to anything, whether it's health care problems, education, whatever it is -- it's got to be more government.
-- Harry Browne
 
The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances.
-- Harry Browne
 
We should never define libertarian positions in terms coined by liberals and conservatives, nor as some variant of their positions. We are not fiscally conservative and socially liberal. We are libertarians, who believe in individual liberty and personal responsibility on all issues at all times.
-- Harry Browne
 
If the Fed had a war on abortion like its war on poverty or war on drugs, within 5 years men would be having abortions!
-- Harry Browne
 
The income tax is the biggest single intrusion suffered by the American people. It forces every worker to be a bookkeeper, to open his records to the government, to explain his expenses, to fear conviction for a harmless accounting error. Compliance wastes billions of dollars. It penalizes savings and creates an enormous drag on the U.S. economy. It is incompatible with a free society, and we aren’t libertarians if we tolerate it.
-- Harry Browne
 
There are no violent gangs fighting over aspirin territories. There are no violent gangs fighting over whisky territories or computer territories or anything else that's legal. There are only criminal gangs fighting over territories covering drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other victimless crimes. Making a non-violent activity a crime creates a black market, which attracts criminals and gangs, which turns what was once a relatively harmless activity affecting a small group of people into a widespread epidemic of drug use and gang warfare.
-- Harry Browne
 
Government is a parasite—a cancer that by nature tries to spread deeper into society. Those who want to run others’ lives won’t give up and start minding their own business.
-- Harry Browne
 
Republicans campaign like Libertarians and govern like Democrats.
-- Harry Browne
 
The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, ‘See if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’
-- Harry Browne
 
A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot -- because the first leads inevitably to the second.
-- Harry Browne
 
Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all your money), and no right to compensation for the property that's been taken.
-- Harry Browne
 
I want a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution.
-- Harry Browne
 
A welfare state is frightened of every poor person who tries to get in and every rich person who tries to get out.
-- Harry Browne
 
The elegance of honesty needs no adornment.
-- Merry Browne
 
The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority.
-- Sir Thomas Browne
 
Be assured that if this new provision [the 14th Amendment] be engrafted in the Constitution, it will, in time, change the entire structure and texture of our government, and sweep away all the guarantees of safety devised and provided by our patriotic Sires of the Revolution.
-- Orville Browning
 
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for?
-- Robert Browning
 
So free we seem, so fettered fast we are.
-- Robert Browning
 
[U]nderlying the gun control struggle is a fundamental division in our nation. The intensity of passion on this issue suggests to me that we are experiencing a sort of low grade war going on between two alternative views of what America is and ought to be. On the one side are those who take bourgeois Europe as a model of civilized society: a society just, equitable, and democratic; but well ordered, with the lines of responsibility and authority clearly drawn, and with decisions made rationally and correctly by intelligent men for the entire nation. To such people, hunting is atavistic, personal violence is shameful, and uncontrolled gun ownership is a blot on civilization. On the other side is a group of people who do not tend to be especially articulate or literate, and whose world view is rarely expressed in print. .... They ask, because they do not understand the other side, “Why do these people want to disarm us?” They consider themselves no threat to anyone; they are not criminals, not revolutionaries. But slowly, as they become politicized, they find an analysis that fits the phenomenon they experience: Someone fears their having guns, someone is afraid of their defending their families, property, and liberty. Nasty things may begin to happen if these people begin to feel that they are cornered.
-- B. Bruce-Briggs
 
In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.
-- Lenny Bruce
 
They call it the Halls of Justice because the only place you get justice is in the halls.
-- Lenny Bruce
 
Anyone who does anything for pleasure to indulge his selfish soul will surely burn in Hell.
-- Lenny Bruce
 
As the organized Left gained cultural power, it turned into a monster that found perpetual victimhood, combined with thought and speech control, the most efficient way to hold on to that power. Suddenly it was the Left, the protector of liberty, that was setting rules about what could and could not be said or even thought.
-- Tammy Bruce
 
No matter how noble the original intentions, the seductions of power can turn any movement from one seeking equal rights to one that would deny them to others.
-- Tammy Bruce
 
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
-- Giordano Bruno
 
Every time we establish a new crime, we’re creating a new mechanism for the government to check up on you.
-- James A. Bruton, III
 
I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befall this country, than be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge. If this be a just remark, it is unwise and improvident to vest in the general government a power to borrow at discretion, without any limitation or restriction.
-- Brutus
 
Money power denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.
-- William Jennings Bryan
 
You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
-- William Jennings Bryan
 
If you are afraid to speak against tyranny, then you are already a slave.
-- John "Birdman" Bryant
 
Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again.
-- William Cullen Bryant
 
The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the pen, by the press, all political questions, and to examine the animadvert upon all political institutions is a right so clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact, to their existence, that without it we must fall into despotism and anarchy.
-- William Cullen Bryant
 
Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions.
-- James Bryce
 
I have often asked Americans wherein they consider their freedom superior to that of the English, but have never found them able to indicate a single point in which the individual is worse off in England as regards his private civil rights or his general liberty of doing and thinking as he pleases. They generally turn the discussion to social equality, the existence of a monarchy and hereditary titles and so forth – matters which are, of course, quite different from freedom in its proper sense.
-- James Bryce
 
Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen...
-- Zbigniew Brzezinski
 
If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.
-- James Buchanan
 
I like the noise of democracy.
-- James Buchanan
 
What is right and what is practicable are two different things.
-- James Buchanan
 
We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy. We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called 'isolationism.'
-- Patrick J. Buchanan
 
The village atheist has the right to be heard; he has no right to be heeded. While he has a right not to have his own children indoctrinated in what he believes are false and foolish teachings, he has no right to dictate what other children may be taught.
-- Patrick J. Buchanan
 
Tax reform is taking the taxes off things that have been taxed in the past and putting taxes on things that haven't been taxed before.
-- Art Buchwald
 
If the sincere and thoughtful Mason would “take notice” of the symbolism and the use made everywhere in the Lodge of the word “Light,” and remember that the real Initiates are called also “the Illuminati.”
-- J.D. Buck
 
None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.
-- Pearl S. Buck
 
Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it.
-- Pearl S. Buck
 
We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.
 
All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.
 
Now it is one thing to say (I say it) that people shouldn’t consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely something else to condone marijuana laws, the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to inform ourselves on the question?
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.
 
Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.
 
Marijuana is not much more difficult to obtain than beer. The reason for this is that a liquor store selling beer to a minor stands to lose its liquor license. Marijuana salesmen don't have expensive overheads, and so are not easily punished.
-- William F. Buckley, Jr.
 
As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts.
-- Buddha
 
Do not overrate what you have received, nor envy others. He who envies others does not obtain peace of mind.
-- Buddha
 
A man should first direct himself in the way he should go. Only then should he instruct others.
-- Buddha
 
Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.
-- Buddha
 
Our theories of the eternal are as valuable as are those which a chick which has not broken its way through its shell might form of the outside world.
-- Buddha
 
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.
-- Buddha
 
He who loves 50 people has 50 woes; he who loves no one has no woes.
-- Buddha
 
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
-- Buddha
 
Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.
-- Buddha
 
To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance.
-- Buddha
 
On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him.
-- Buddha
 
Do not dwell in the past, do not dwell in the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
-- Buddha
 
Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.
-- Buddha
 
Through zeal, knowledge is gotten; through lack of zeal, knowledge is lost; let a man who knows the double path of gain and loss thus place himself that knowledge may grow.
-- Buddha
 
Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful.
-- Buddha
 
Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher.
-- Buddha
 
Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.
-- Buddha
 
Whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings…that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
-- Buddha
 
Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher.
-- Buddha
 
Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
-- Buddha
 
You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
-- Buddha
 
A good friend who points out mistakes and imperfections and rebukes evil is to be respected as if he reveals a secret of hidden treasure.
-- Buddha
 
To keep the body in good health is a duty...otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.
-- Buddha
 
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
-- Buddha
 
All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?
-- Buddha
 
To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent.
-- Buddha
 
It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.
-- Buddha
 
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
-- Buddha
 
Thoughts give joy when they speak or act. Joy follows them like a shadow that never leaves them.
-- Buddha
 
Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height.
-- Buddha
 
Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.
-- Buddha
 
We are what we think. All that we are arises With our thoughts. With our thoughts, We make our world.
-- Buddha
 
The world, indeed, is like a dream and the treasures of the world are an alluring mirage! Like the apparent distances in a picture, things have no reality in themselves, but they are like heat haze.
-- Buddha
 
The Buddhas do but tell the way; it is for you to swelter at the task.
-- Buddha
 
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
-- Buddha
 
It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.
-- Buddha
 
A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another. If these minds love one another the home will be as beautiful as a flower garden. But if these minds get out of harmony with one another it is like a storm that plays havoc with the garden.
-- Buddha
 
Born out of concern for all beings.
-- Buddha
 
A jug fills drop by drop.
-- Buddha
 
Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.
-- Buddha
 
You should respect each other and refrain from disputes; you should not, like water and oil, repel each other, but should, like milk and water, mingle together.
-- Buddha
 
There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it.
-- Buddha
 
As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds.
-- Buddha
 
There is, Oh Monks, a not-born, a not-become, a not-made, a not-compounded. Monks, if that unborn, not-become, not-made, not-compounded were not, there would be no escape from this here that is born, become, made and compounded.
-- Buddha
 
On a long journey of human life, faith is the best of companions; it is the best refreshment on the journey; and it is the greatest property.
-- Buddha
 
Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.
-- Buddha
 
Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed.
-- Buddha
 
It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.
-- Buddha
 
Good men and bad men differ radically. Bad men never appreciate kindness shown them, but wise men appreciate and are grateful. Wise men try to express their appreciation and gratitude by some return of kindness, not only to their benefactor, but to everyone else.
-- Buddha
 
Ye must leave righteous ways behind, not to speak of unrighteous ways.
-- Buddha
 
If a man possesses a repentant spirit his sins will disappear, but if he has an unrepentant spirit his sins will continue and condemn him for their sake forever.
-- Buddha
 
Friendship is the only cure for hatred, the only guarantee of peace.
-- Buddha
 
Those who really seek the path to Enlightenment dictate terms to their mind. Then they proceed with strong determination.
-- Buddha
 
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
-- Buddha
 
The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed.
-- Buddha
 
Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.
-- Buddha
 
Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good.
-- Buddha
 
We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.
-- Buddha
 
All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, We make our world.
-- Buddha
 
Decay is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.
-- Buddha
 
All that we are is the result of what we have thought.
-- Buddha
 
Everything changes, nothing remains without change.
-- Buddha
 
An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.
-- Buddha
 
A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker.
-- Buddha
 
A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes the suffering.
-- Buddha
 
He is able who thinks he is able.
-- Buddha
 
Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed.
-- Buddha
 
Do not overrate what you have received, nor envy others. He who envies others does not obtain peace of mind.
-- Buddha
 

-- Buddha
 
Everything is changeable, everything appears and disappears; there is no blissful peace until one passes beyond the agony of life and death.
-- Buddha
 
Be a lamp unto yourself. Work out your liberation with diligence.
-- Buddha
 
An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.
-- Buddha
 
If a man's mind becomes pure, his surroundings will also become pure.
-- Buddha
 
What we think, we become.
-- Buddha
 
They are not following dharma who resort to violence to achieve their purpose. But those who lead others through nonviolent means, knowing right and wrong, may be called guardians of the dharma.
-- Buddha
 
To conquer oneself is a greater victory than to conquer thousands in a battle.
-- Buddha
 
When one has the feeling of dislike for evil, when one feels tranquil, one finds pleasure in listening to good teachings; when one has these feelings and appreciates them, one is free of fear.
-- Buddha
 
We are formed and molded by our thoughts. Those whose minds are shaped by selfless thoughts give joy when they speak or act. Joy follows them like a shadow that never leaves them.
-- Buddha
 
Inward calm cannot be maintained unless physical strength is constantly and intelligently replenished.
-- Buddha
 
There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.
-- Buddha
 
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.
-- Buddha
 
Meditation brings wisdom; lack of mediation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what hold you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom.
-- Buddha
 
Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.
-- Buddha
 
Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.
-- Buddha
 
All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.
-- Buddha
 
There is nothing more dreadful than the habit of doubt. Doubt separates people. It is a poison that disintegrates friendships and breaks up pleasant relations. It is a thorn that irritates and hurts; it is a sword that kills.
-- Buddha
 
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.
-- Buddha
 
Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.
-- Buddha
 
Your body is precious. It is our vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.
-- Buddha
 
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
-- Buddha
 
You are all the Buddha.
-- Buddha
 
Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball.
-- Warren Buffett
 
...it's a good idea to review past mistakes before committing new ones.
-- Warren Buffett
 
Marihuana is a more dangerous drug than heroin or cocaine. I am surprised to learn that certain police officers have been inclined to minimize the effects of the use of marihuana. They would, I am sure, be convinced that the drug is adhering to its Old World traditions of murder, assault, rape, physical demoralization, and mental breakdown. A study of the effects of marihuana shows clearly that it is a dangerous drug, and Bureau records prove that its use is associated with insanity and crime.
-- Bulletin of the FBI
 
No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.
-- Alan Bullock
 
'Tis impossible to be sure of anything but Death and Taxes.
-- Christopher Bullock
 
The pen is mightier than the sword.
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton
 
There is no man so friendless but what he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths.
-- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
 
If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues.
-- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
 
Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.
-- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
 
Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness.
-- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
 
Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness.
-- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
 
It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while.
-- Luther Burbank
 
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet or they remain sterile abstractions. The hands and feet we need are efficient means and methods to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and at the lowest possible cost.
-- Justice Warren E. Burger
 
There can be no assumption that today’s majority is “right” and the Amish or others like them are “wrong.” A way of life that is odd or even erratic but interferes with no right or interests of others is not to be condemned because it is different.
-- Justice Warren E. Burger
 
... ours is a sick profession marked by incompetence, lack of training, misconduct and bad manners. Ineptness, bungling, malpractice, and bad ethics can be observed in court houses all over this country every day ... these incompetents have a seeming unawareness of the fundamental ethics of the profession. ... the harsh truth is that ... we may well be on our way to a society, overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated.
-- Justice Warren E. Burger
 
There are many prices we pay for freedoms secured by the First Amendment; the risk of undue influence is one of them, confirming what we have long known: Freedom is hazardous, but some restraints are worse.
-- Justice Warren E. Burger
 
Judges ... rule on the basis of law, not public opinion, and they should be totally indifferent to pressures of the times.
-- Justice Warren E. Burger
 
Without bigots, eccentrics, cranks and heretics the world would not progress.
-- Frank Gelett Burgess
 
No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.
-- James Burgh
 
All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people.
-- James Burgh
 
They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.
-- Edmund Burke
 
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
-- Edmund Burke
 
No government ought to exist for the purpose of checking the prosperity of its people or to allow such a principle in its policy.
-- Edmund Burke
 
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
-- Edmund Burke
 
The use of force alone is but temporary.  It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist.
-- Edmund Burke
 
To govern according to the sense and agreement of the interests of the people is a great and glorious object of governance. This object cannot be obtained but through the medium of popular election, and popular election is a mighty evil.
-- Edmund Burke
 
If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.
-- Edmund Burke
 
It is by this tribunal that statesmen [are tried] not upon the niceties of a narrow jurisprudence but upon the enlarged and solid principles of morality.
-- Edmund Burke
 
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
-- Edmund Burke
 
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
-- Edmund Burke
 
It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
-- Edmund Burke
 
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
-- Edmund Burke
 
The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.
-- Edmund Burke
 
In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed and the boldest staggered.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
-- Edmund Burke
 
People crushed by law have no hope but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous...
-- Edmund Burke
 
Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young peoples, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.
-- Edmund Burke
 
There never was a bad man that had ability for good service.
-- Edmund Burke
 
I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded. ... We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard-of-power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.
-- Edmund Burke
 
In a free country every man thinks he has a concern in all public matters,--that he has a right to form and a right to deliver an opinion on them. This it is that fills countries with men of ability in all stations.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue.
-- Edmund Burke
 
We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.
-- Edmund Burke
 
There are three estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech or witty saying, it is a literal fact, very momentous to us in these times.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Liberty, without wisdom, is license.
-- Edmund Burke
 
The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.
-- Edmund Burke
 
The greater the power the more dangerous the abuse.
-- Edmund Burke
 
All men have equal rights, but not to equal things.
-- Edmund Burke
 
The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.
-- Edmund Burke
 
The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion.
-- Edmund Burke
 
There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity -- the law of nature, and of nations.
-- Edmund Burke
 
The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man's pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.
-- Edmund Burke
 
There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.
-- Edmund Burke
 
There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Those who have been intoxicated with power... can never willingly abandon it.
-- Edmund Burke
 
To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to deprecate the value of freedom itself.
-- Edmund Burke
 
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
-- Edmund Burke
 
The only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.
-- Edmund Burke
 
It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
-- Edmund Burke
 
My vigour relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.
-- Edmund Burke
 
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
-- Edmund Burke
 
Guns are used for self-defense somewhere between 800,000 and 3.6 million times per year .... Using firearm crime and defensive gun use figures most favorable to advocates for stricter gun control, ... the benefits from defensive gun uses exceed the cost of violent firearm crimes ... by between $90 million and $3.5 billion. Using the most credible estimate for defensive gun uses, the benefits range from $1 billion to $38 billion. Putting these dollar figures in more human terms: Guns save lives. The fact is that the best defense against violence is an armed response. For example, women faced with assault are 2.5 times less likely to suffer serious injury if they defend themselves with a gun rather than responding with other weapons or by offering no resistance. ... [P]ersons defending themselves with guns during an assault are injured only 12 percent of the time, compared to 25 percent for those using other weapons, 27 percent for those offering no resistance and nearly 26 percent of those who flee. ... [F]irearms are the safest, most effective way to protect oneself against criminal activity -- which is why American police officers carry guns rather than going unarmed or merely carrying knives.
-- H. Sterling Burnett
 
Too bad all the people who know how to run this country are busy running taxicabs or cutting hair.
-- George Burns
 
Dare to be honest and fear no labor.
-- Robert Burns
 
Liberty's in every blow! Let us do or die.
-- Robert Burns
 
Once the law starts asking questions, there's no stopping them.
-- William S. Burroughs
 
After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.
-- William S. Burroughs
 
Do what thy manhood bids thee do, From none but self expect applause: He noblest lives and noblest dies Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
-- Sir Richard Francis Burton
 
The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.
-- Sir Richard Francis Burton
 
As compared with impulsive commitment to the first idea which dawns, that is, with intuitive action, reasoning is patient, exploratory of other possibilities, and deliberative.
-- Edwin Arthur Burtt
 
Your success as a family, our success as a society, depends not on what happens at the White House, but what happens inside your house.
-- Barbara Bush
 
[The war in Iraq is] a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times...a new world order can emerge.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
If we do not follow the dictates of our moral compass and stand up for human life, then this lawlessness will threaten the peace and democracy of the emerging new world order we now see, this long dreamed-of vision we’ve all worked toward for so long.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
Freedom and the power to choose should not be the privilege of wealth. They are the birthright of every American.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
It was just one year ago that the world saw this new, invigorated United Nations in action as this Council stood fast against aggression and stood for the sacred principles enshrined in the U.N. Charter. And now it's time to step forward again, make the internal reforms, accelerate the revitalization, accept the responsibilities necessary for a vigorous and effective United Nations. I want to assure the members of this Council and the Secretary-General, the United Nations can count on our full support in this task.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
For two centuries we’ve done the hard work of freedom. And tonight we lead the world in facing down a threat to decency and humanity. What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea—a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law. Such is a world worthy of our struggle, and worthy of our children’s future.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
My vision of a 'new world order' foresees a United Nations with a revitalized peacekeeping function.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
We will succeed in the Gulf. And when we do, the world community will have sent an enduring warning to any dictator or despot, present or future, who contemplates outlaw aggression. The world can therefore seize this opportunity to fulfill the long-held promise of a new world order—where brutality will go unrewarded, and aggression will meet collective resistance.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
Ultimately, our objective is to welcome the Soviet Union back into the world order. Perhaps the world order of the future will truly be a family of nations.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the rule of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful, and we will be, we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the UN’s founders.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
It is the sacred principles enshrined in the UN Charter to which we will henceforth pledge our allegiance.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush (False)
 
If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched.
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
 
Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty.
-- George W. Bush
 
We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.
-- George W. Bush
 
We have every reason to assume the worst.
-- George W. Bush
 
Today the Justice Department did issue a blanket alert. It was in recognition of a general threat we received. This is not the first time the Justice Department have acted like this. I hope it is the last. But given the attitude of the evildoers, it may not be.
-- George W. Bush
 
The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.
-- George W. Bush
 
I don’t give a goddamn. I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way. ... Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!
-- George W. Bush
 
We will fight with full force and might of the United States military.
-- George W. Bush
 
Saddam Hussein's regime is a gray and gathering danger.
-- George W. Bush
 
We need an energy bill that encourages consumption.
-- George W. Bush
 
I want him [Saddam Hussein]. I want -- I want justice. There is an old poster seen out west. As I recall, it said, Wanted Dead or Alive.
-- George W. Bush
 
The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We've removed an ally of al Qaeda.
-- George W. Bush
 
There is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland.
-- George W. Bush
 
The choice is his [Saddam Hussein's], and if he does not disarm, the United States of America will lead a coalition and disarm him in the name of Peace.
-- George W. Bush
 
I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office and foreign policy matters with war on my mind.
-- George W. Bush
 
And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for pre-emptive action.
-- George W. Bush
 
If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.
-- George W. Bush
 
There will be no going back to the era before September 11th, 2001, to false comfort in a dangerous world.
-- George W. Bush
 
There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there [in Iraq]. My answer is, 'Bring 'em on.'
-- George W. Bush
 
We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th.
-- George W. Bush
 
Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
-- George W. Bush
 
During my senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society, so secret I can’t say anything more.
-- George W. Bush
 
Our enemies are a radical network of terrorists -- and every government that supports them.
-- George W. Bush
 
They misunderestimated me.
-- George W. Bush
 
We're too great a nation to allow the evildoers to affect our soul.
-- George W. Bush
 
Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.
-- Vannevar Bush
 
My liberty is not for sale.
-- Edward Bushell
 
The love of liberty that is not a real principle of dutiful behavior to authority is as hypocritical as the religion that is not productive of a good life.
-- Bishop Joseph Butler
 
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
-- Nicholas Murray Butler
 
The old world order died with the setting of that day’s sun and a new world order is being born while I speak, with birth-pangs so terrible that it seems almost incredible that life could come out of such fearful suffering and such overwhelming sorrow.
-- Nicholas Murray Butler
 
Politics is the art of the possible.
-- R. A. Butler
 
He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still.
-- Samuel Butler
 
The more unpopular an opinion is, the more necessary it is that the holder should be somewhat punctilious in his observance of conventionalities generally.
-- Samuel Butler
 
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
-- Samuel Butler
 
Authority intoxicates,\\ And makes mere sots of magistrates;\\ The fumes of it invade the brain,\\ And make men giddy, proud and vain.
-- Samuel Butler
 
There should be some schools called deformatories to which people are sent if they are too good to be practical.
-- Samuel Butler
 
I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.
-- Samuel Butler
 
I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street...
-- Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
 
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
-- Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
 
My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military.
-- Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
 
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
-- Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
 

-- Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
 
I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
-- Major General Smedley Darlington Butler
 
No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; its only use is to make them take bad money.
-- Stephen T. Byington
 
A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man’s business; the eye of the Federal inspector will be in every man’s counting house. The law will of necessity have inquisitorial features, it will provide penalties. It will create a complicated machinery. Under it businessmen will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of Federal inspectors, spies and detectives will descend upon the state. They will compel men of business to show their books and disclose the secrets of their affairs. They will dictate forms of bookkeeping. They will require statements and affidavits. On the one hand the inspector can blackmail the taxpayer and on the other, he can profit by selling his secret to his competitor.
-- Richard Evelyn Byrd, Sr.
 
A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man's business; the eye of the federal inspector will be in every man's counting house.... The law will of necessity have inquisical features, it will provide penalties, it will create complicated machinery. Under it, men will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of federal inspectors, spies, and detectives will descend upon the state.
-- Richard Evelyn Byrd, Sr.
 
Is it any wonder, why the approval ratings of the Congress go up every time we go into recess?
-- Sen. Robert C. Byrd
 
The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose.
-- Robert Byrne
 
Sound the loud timbrel o'er Egypt's dark sea! Jehovah hath triumphed--his people are free.
-- Lord Byron
 
Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?
-- Lord Byron
 
For Freedom's battle once begun, Bequeath'd by bleeding sire to son, Though baffled oft is ever won.
-- Lord Byron
 
Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.
-- Lord Byron
 
The wish, which ages have not yet subdued In man, to have no master save his mood.
-- Lord Byron
 
Know ye not who would be free themselves must strike the blow? by their right arms the conquest must be wrought?
-- Lord Byron
 
He makes a solitude, and calls it - peace.
-- Lord Byron
 
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.
-- Lord Byron
 
My time has been passed viciously and agreeably; at thirty-one so few years months days hours or minutes remain that "Carpe Diem" is not enough. I have been obliged to crop even the seconds -- for who can trust to tomorrow?
-- Lord Byron
 
I wish men to be free, as much from mobs as kings,—from you as me.
-- Lord Byron
 
The statute mandating recitation of the pledge [of allegiance] is secular because it aims to foster democracy, which is both necessary to the survival of the concept and entirely independent of religion. [...] It is clear in the 2001 [Virginia] state law that no student is forced to accept the beliefs the pledge espouses.
-- James C. Cacheris
 
When the swords flash let no idea of love, piety, or even the face of your fathers move you.
-- Gaius Julius Caesar
 
All bad precedents began as justifiable measures.
-- Gaius Julius Caesar
 
Men willingly believe what they wish.
-- Gaius Julius Caesar
 
Beware of the leader, who strikes the war drum in order to transfer the citizens into patriotic glow, patriotism is indeed a double-sided sword. It makes the blood so boldly, like it constricts the intellect. And if the striking of the war drum reached a fiebrige height and the blood is cooking and hating, and the intellect is dismissed, the leader doesn't need to reject the citizens rights. The citizens, cought by anxiety and blinded through patriotism, will subordinate all their rights to the leader and this even with happy courage. Why do I know that? I know it, because this is, what I did. And I am Gajus Julius Cäsar.
-- Gaius Julius Caesar (False)
 
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
-- John Cage
 
The people’s right to obtain information does not, of course, depend on any assured ability to understand its significance or use it wisely. Facts belong to the people simply because they relate to interests that are theirs, government that is theirs, and votes that they may desire to cast, for they are entitled to an active role in shaping every fundamental decision of state.
-- Edmond Cahn
 
“Due process,” a standard that arose in our system of law and stemmed from the desire to provide rational procedure and fair play, is equally indispensable in every other kind of social or political enterprise.
-- Edmond Cahn
 
Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.
-- Justice Millard Fillmore Caldwell
 
To maintain the ascendancy of the Constitution over the lawmaking majority is the great and essential point on which the success of the [American] system must depend; unless that ascendancy can be preserved, the necessary consequence must be that the laws will supersede the Constitution; and, finally, the will of the Executive, by influence of its patronage, will supersede the laws ...
-- John C. Calhoun
 
A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks.
-- John C. Calhoun
 
The government of the absolute majority is but the government of the strongest interests; and when not effectively checked, is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised... [To read the Constitution is to realize that] no free system was ever farther removed from the principle that the absolute majority, without check or limitation, ought to govern.
-- John C. Calhoun
 
It is federal, because it is the government of States united in a political union, in contradistinction to a government of individuals, that is, by what is usually called, a social compact. To express it more concisely, it is federal and not national because it is the government of a community of States, and not the government of a single State or Nation.
-- John C. Calhoun
 
Government has within it a tendency to abuse its powers.
-- John C. Calhoun
 
Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail.
-- John C. Calhoun
 
In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. … They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.
-- Oscar Callaway
 
I regret to say it, but we are gradually turning over the business of Congress, turning over all our constitutional rights, turning over our powers delegated by the people to a lot of editors, theorists, and college professors who are not capable of conducting our affairs and to whom we should not abdicate.
-- Oscar Callaway
 
It would not be unreasonable, by analogy with a motor vehicle licence, that a permit to reproduce should also be needed with a minimum age of, for example, twenty-five, and a proof required that the parents are of sufficient maturity and financial resource to take proper care of the child. Young, sexually active, but emotionally immature teenagers would need help.
-- Sir Roy Calne
 
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do...
-- Italo Calvino
 
An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.
-- Simon Cameron
 
Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.
-- Dalton Camp
 
When we regard a man as morally responsible for an act, we regard him as a legitimate object of moral praise or blame in respect of it. But it seems plain that a man cannot be a legitimate object of moral praise or blame for an act unless in willing the act he is in some important sense a ‘free’ agent. Evidently free will in some sense, therefore, is a precondition of moral responsibility.
-- C. Arthur Campbell
 
Hope for a season bade the world farewell, And Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell! . . . . O'er Prague's proud arch the fires of ruin glow.
-- Thomas Campbell
 
Today the grand jury is the total captive of the prosecutor who, if he is candid, will concede that he can indict anybody, at any time, for almost anything, before any grand jury.
-- William J. Campbell
 
Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.
-- Albert Camus
 
The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.
-- Albert Camus
 
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
-- Albert Camus
 
Integrity has no need of rules.
-- Albert Camus
 
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
-- Albert Camus
 
Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.
-- Albert Camus
 
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-- Albert Camus
 
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
-- Albert Camus
 
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
-- Albert Camus
 
I'll tell you a big secret, my friend: Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It happens every day.
-- Albert Camus
 
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.
-- Albert Camus
 
How many crimes are permitted simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.
-- Albert Camus
 
Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.
-- Albert Camus
 
It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.
-- Albert Camus
 
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
-- Albert Camus
 
The aim of art, the aim of a life, can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.
-- Albert Camus
 
The regulation prohibiting abusive comment that tends or is likely to expose a person or a group to hatred or contempt is necessary not only to avoid harm to the persons targeted, but also to ensure that Canadian values are respected for all Canadians. The broadcast of remarks that could expose individuals or groups to hatred or contempt can attract individuals to its cause and in the process create serious discord between various groups in Canadian society to the detriment of all of Canadian society. This harm undermines the cultural, political and social fabric of Canada which the Canadian broadcasting system is expressly meant to safeguard, enrich and strengthen. It also undermines the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society, which the programming of the Canadian broadcasting system should reflect. Protection from the harms of abusive comment is for the benefit of all Canadians.
-- Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission
 
After listening to the recordings containing the remarks made by on-air personalities on 10 and 27 September and 8 October and reading the stenographic notes, the Commission identified several remarks about the complainant related to her physical attributes, and sexual attributes in particular. There are multiple references to the size of her breasts; [translation] 'her incredible set of boobs' ... The Commission considers that the remarks made about Ms. Chiasson were abusive and tended to expose her, and women in general, to contempt on the basis of sex, in contravention of section 3(b) of the Regulations. Further, the remarks do not meet the objectives of the broadcasting policy for Canada set out in the Act. The remarks did not meet the objective of high standard of programming required by section 3(1)(g) of the Act.
-- Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission
 
[I]f the public are bound to yield obedience to laws to which they cannot give their approbation, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them.
-- Candidus
 
A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held.
-- Georg Cantor
 
Our tax system is based on individual self-assessment and voluntary compliance.
-- Mortimer Caplin
 
The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls.
-- Father Robert F. Capon
 
When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality.
-- Al Capone
 
Remember to vote early -- and often.
-- Al Capone
 
You can do more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word.
-- Al Capone
 
You cannot become a truly effective advocate unless you know all sides of your subject thoroughly, opposing arguments as well as your own.
-- G. R. Capp
 
Reasonable argument is impossible when authority becomes the arbiter.
-- Orson Scott Card
 
It is time for our school systems to stop accepting the gospel of that false religion and start doing their due diligence. Our children should be taught about the demonstrable solar cycles; and the whole human-caused Global Warming theory, along with the Hockey Stick Hoax, should be taught only as another example, after Piltdown Man and pre-Copernican theories of planetary movement, of how science can be corrupted when ideology gets ahead of the data.
-- Orson Scott Card
 
If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
-- Orson Scott Card
 
The only way to learn is by changing your mind.
-- Orson Scott Card
 
The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.
-- Justice Benjamin Cardozo
 
Of...freedom [of thought and speech] one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
-- Justice Benjamin Cardozo
 
Justice, though due to the accused, is due the accuser also. The concept of fairness cannot be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep our balance true.
-- Justice Benjamin Cardozo
 
It is for ordinary minds, not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, or practical expediency, and not in rules of logic.
-- Justice Benjamin Cardozo
 
We, Negro Americans, sing with all loyal Americans:\\ My country 'tis of thee,\\ Sweet land of liberty,\\ Of thee I sing.\\ Land where my fathers died,\\ Land of the Pilgrims' pride\\ From every mountainside\\ Let freedom ring!\\ \\ That's exactly what we mean -- from every mountain side, let freedom ring. Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire; not only from the Catskills of New York; but from the Ozarks in Arkansas, from the Stone Mountain in Georgia, from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia -- let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States, but for the disinherited of all the earth -- may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside, LET FREEDOM RING!
-- Rev. Archibald Carey, Jr.
 
Free discussion is the only necessary Constitution -- the only necessary Law of the Constitution.
-- Richard Carlile
 
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
-- Thomas Carlyle
 
Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.
-- Thomas Carlyle
 
Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man.
-- Thomas Carlyle
 
Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling buisness: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.
-- Thomas Carlyle
 
I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves. They never pauperize. They reach the aspiring and open to these chief treasures of the world -- those stored up in books. A taste for reading drives out lower tastes.
-- Andrew Carnegie
 
As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
-- Andrew Carnegie
 
All honor's wounds are self-inflicted.
-- Andrew Carnegie
 
There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.
-- Andrew Carnegie
 
I believe Socialism is the grandest theory ever presented, and I am sure it will someday rule the world. Then we will have attained the Millennium... Then men will be content to work for the general welfare and share their riches with their neighbors.
-- Andrew Carnegie
 
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain -- and most fools do.
-- Dale Carnegie
 
As the federal government has progressively become larger over the decades, every significant introduction of government regulation, taxation and spending has been to the benefit of some big business.
-- Timothy P. Carney
 
In a free country there is much clamor, with little suffering; in a despotic state there is little complaint, with much grievance.
-- Hippolyte Lazare Carnot
 
I was taught when I was a young reporter that it's news when we say it is. I think that's still true -- it's news when 'we' say it is. It's just who 'we' is has changed. Members of the public, people with modems, people with cell phones are now producers, editors. They can push and push and push on a story until it ends up being acknowledged by everyone.
-- David Carr
 
...no nation which signs this [UN] Charter can justly maintain that any of its acts are its own business, or within its own domestic jurisdiction, if the security council says that these acts are a threat to the peace.
-- William Carr
 
Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure (and) which insures to the good eternal happiness, are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.
-- Charles Carroll
 
When I use a word...it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less....The question is...which is to be master -- that's all.
-- Lewis Carroll
 
Contrariwise", continued Tweedledee, "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.
-- Lewis Carroll
 
My mother worked as a domestic, two, sometimes three jobs at a time because she didn’t want to be on welfare. She felt very strongly that if she gave up and went on welfare, that she would give up control of her life and of our lives, and I think she was probably correct about that. … But, one thing that she provided us was a tremendous example of what hard work is like.
-- Dr. Ben Carson
 
The more solid the family foundation, the more likely you are to be able to resist peer pressure. Human beings are social creatures. We all want to belong, we all have that desire, and we will belong, one way or another. If the family doesn’t provide that, the peers will, or a gang will, or you will find something to belong to. That’s why it becomes so critical for families with young children to understand what a critical anchor they are.
-- Dr. Ben Carson
 
There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings.
-- Hodding Carter
 
The law is not the private property of lawyers, nor is justice the exclusive province of judges and juries. In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect.
-- Jimmy Carter
 
The decision to attack the entire nation [of Yugoslavia] has been counterproductive, and our destruction of civilian life has now become senseless and excessively brutal. ... The United States' insistence on the use of cluster bombs, designed to kill or maim humans, is condemned almost universally and brings discredit on our nation (as does our refusal to support a ban on land mines). Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means.
-- Jimmy Carter
 
America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America.
-- Jimmy Carter
 
We are of course a nation of differences. Those differences don’t make us weak. They’re the source of our strength.
-- Jimmy Carter
 
If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.
-- Jimmy Carter
 
In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.
-- Jimmy Carter
 
I think that every true reformer, every real friend of liberty, will agree with me in saying that if we must erect safeguards, they should be rather for the security of the individual than of the mass, and that our chiefest care must be to train the majority to respect the rights of the minority, to prevent the claims of the few from being trampled under foot by the caprice or passion of the many.
-- Sir Richard John Cartwright
 
The Democratic constituency is just like a herd of cows. All you have to do is lay out enough silage and they come running. That’s why I became an operative working with Democrats. With Democrats all you have to do is make a lot of noise, lay out the hay, and be ready to use the ole cattle prod in case a few want to bolt the herd.
-- James Carville (Questionable)
 
For good or evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity.
-- Joyce Cary
 
It is sometimes said that toleration should be refused to the intolerant. In practice this would destroy it... The only remedy for dogmatism and lies is toleration and the greatest possible liberty of expression.
-- Joyce Cary
 
Every wrong seems possible today, and is accepted.  I don't accept it.
-- Pablo Casals
 
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
-- Pablo Casals
 
Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
-- Douglas Casey
 
The growth of drug-related crime is a far greater evil to society as a whole than drug taking. Even so, because we have been seduced by the idea that governments should legislate for our own good, very few people can see how dangerously absurd the present policy is.
-- John Casey
 
Considering that senior officials at the Internal Revenue Service are fully aware of the fact that there is no law currently in existence making a U.S. citizen liable for or required to pay either the income tax or the social security employment tax, only a truly generous citizen would, upon discovering this, continue to voluntarily donate these taxes to the government by allowing them to be withheld from his paycheck on a 100% voluntary W-4 withholding agreement. But, then again, the IRS would be dead in the water without the "voluntary (and docile) compliance" of employers and employees and has said so all along.
-- William Cash
 
The freedom to express varying and often opposing ideas is essential to a variety of conceptions of democracy. If democracy is viewed as essentially a process – a way in which collective decisions for a society are made – free expression is crucial to the openness of the process and to such characteristics as elections, representation of interests, and the like.
-- Jonathan D. Casper
 
Ah yes, truth. Funny how everyone is always asking for it but when they get it they don't believe it because it's not the truth they want to hear.
-- Helena Cassadine
 
In the end, legalization of certain substances may be the only way to bring prices down, and doing so may be the only remedy to some of the worst aspects of the drug plague: violence, corruption, and the collapse of the rule of law.
-- Jorge Castañeda
 
We must establish a new world order based on justice, on equity, and on peace.
-- Fidel Castro
 
The problem with political jokes is they get elected.
-- Henry Cate VII
 
The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.
-- Willa Cather
 
Every evil, harm and suffering in this life comes from the love of riches.
-- Catherine of Siena
 
By Liberty I understand the Power which every Man has over his own Actions, and his Right to enjoy the Fruits of his Labour, Art, and Industry, as far as by it he hurts not the Society, or any Members of it, by taking from any Member, or by hindering him from enjoying what he himself enjoys. The Fruits of a Man's honest Industry are the just Rewards of it, ascertained to him by natural and eternal Equity, as is his Title to use them in the Manner which he thinks fit: And thus, with the above Limitations, every Man is sole Lord and Arbitrer of his own private Actions and Property.
-- Cato
 
...I know not what treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason...
-- Cato
 
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.
-- Cato
 
Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing Freedom of Speech... Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech...
-- Cato
 
I must own, I know not what Treason is, if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason, in the eternal and original Nature of Things.
-- Cato
 
I would not be beholden to a tyrant, for his acts of tyranny. For it is but usurpation in him to save, as their rightful lord, the lives of men over whom he has no title to reign.
-- Cato the Younger
 
There are two kinds of restrictions on human liberty -- the restraint of law and that of custom. No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
-- Carrie Chapman Catt
 
Most reporters are very sympathetic to gun-control agendas and will skew or lie outright about facts to promote them.
-- Dennis Cauchon
 
Each peso [or dollar] is a contract between the government and the peso holder. That contract guarantees that each peso -- as a unit of value that the holder has worked hard to get -- will be worth as much tomorrow as today. If the government breaks the contract, it's breaking the law. The only role of government in the economy should be to guarantee the integrity of market transactions.
-- Domingo Cavallo
 
There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
-- Dick Cavett
 
As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
-- Dick Cavett
 
It's about food. It’s about your home. It’s about your life. The government is worried about all of the above. All I’m saying is you should be worried they’re worried. Here’s why: They’re telling you that you can’t take care of yourself. You can’t be trusted with what you put in your mouth or what you sign on the mortgage dotted line. So they’ll tell you what to put in your mouth and they’ll save you from what you signed on that dotted line. Does anyone see a trend here? Personal responsibility has now become government responsibility.
-- Neil Cavuto
 
You had me on (before) to talk about the new world order ... I talk about it all the time ... It's one world now ... The council (Council on foreign Relations) can find, nurture and begin to put people in the kinds of jobs this country needs. And that's going to be one of the major enterprises of the Council under me..
-- Les Celb
 
Liberty is one of the choicest gifts that heaven hath bestowed upon man, and exceeds in value all the treasures which the earth contains within its bosom, or the sea covers. Liberty, as well as honor, man ought to preserve at the hazard of his life, for without it life is insupportable.
-- Cervantes
 
There's room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.
-- Aimè Cèsaire
 
Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.
-- Zechariah Chafee, Jr.
 
The real value of freedom is not to the minority that wants to talk but to the majority that does not want to listen.
-- Zechariah Chafee, Jr.
 
You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time.
-- Zechariah Chafee, Jr.
 
Freedom from something is not enough. It should also be freedom for something. Freedom is not safety but opportunity. Freedom ought to be a means to enable the press to serve the proper functions of communication in a free society.
-- Zechariah Chafee, Jr.
 
The real value of freedom is not to the minority that wants to talk, but to the majority that does not want to listen.
-- Zechariah Chafee, Jr.
 
The majority of us are for free speech when it deals with subjects concerning which we have no intense feelings.
-- Edmund B. Chaffee
 
One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle-class families of financial reserves. [It] has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State.
-- W. H. Chamberlin
 
One of the most insidious consequences of the present burden of personal income tax is that it strips many middle class families of financial reserves & seems to lend support to campaigns for socialized medicine, socialized housing, socialized food, socialized every thing. The personal income tax has made the individual vastly more dependent on the State & more avid for state hand-outs. It has shifted the balance in America from an individual-centered to a State-centered economic & social system.
-- W. H. Chamberlin
 
The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.
-- Whittaker Chambers
 
Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.
-- Nicolas-Sebasstien Chamfort
 
Now the 21st century approaches and with it the inevitability of change. We must wonder if the American people will find renewal and rejuvenation within themselves, will discover again their capacity for innovation and adaptation. If not, alas, the nation's future will be shaped by sightless forces of history over which Americans will have no control.
-- John Chancellor
 
Once we start to worry too often and too deeply about what certain individuals and what certain groups think about us, then we might start selling our souls for the sake of expediency.
-- Otis Chandler
 
The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
-- Raymond Chandler
 
He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.
-- Raymond Chandler
 
Money for me has only one sound: liberty.
-- Gabrielle Chanel
 
The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people's energy, intellect, and virtues.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
I call the mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith...
-- William Ellery Channing
 
Knowledge is essential to freedom.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
Progress, the growth of power, is the end and boon of liberty; and, without this, a people may have the name, but want the substance and spirit of freedom.
-- William Ellery Channing
 
No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions.
-- Edwin Hubbel Chapin
 
At the bottom of a good deal of bravery... lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.
-- E. H. Chapin
 
Attack another’s rights and you destroy your own.
-- John Jay Chapman
 
Our duty, as men and women is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
 
[T]he sprawl of government into every conceivable realm of life has caused the withering of traditional institutions. Fathers become unnecessary if the government provides Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Church charities lose their mission when the government provides food, shelter and income to the poor. And the non-poor no longer feel pressed to provide aid to those in need, be they aged parents or their unfortunate neighbors—“compassion” having become the province of the state.
-- Mona Charen
 
The people's liberties strengthen the king's prerogative, and the king's prerogative is to defend the people's liberties.
-- Charles I
 
Never make a defence or apology before you be accused.
-- Charles I
 
The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened by convictions.
-- Alexander Chase
 
Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for it's own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one's thoughts.
-- Mary Ellen Chase
 
The legal tender quality [of money] is only valuable for the purposes of dishonesty.
-- Justice Salmon Chase
 
If Congress sees fit to impose a capitation, or other direct tax, it must be laid in proportion to the census; if Congress determines to impose duties, imposts, and excises, they must be uniform throughout the United States. These are not strictly limitations of power. They are rules prescribing the mode in which it shall be exercised. ... This review shows that personal property, contracts, occupations, and the like have never been regarded by Congress as proper subjects of direct tax.
-- Salmon P. Chase
 
The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts.
-- Samuel Chase
 
The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts.
-- Samuel Chase
 
For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.
-- Stuart Chase
 
It will be necessary for us to be a nation of men, and not laws.
-- Dick Cheney (False)
 
The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.
-- Dick Cheney
 
[A]fter unleashing the Red Guards … to serve his political purposes, Mao Zedong was no longer able to control them.
-- Nien Cheng
 
Day and night the city resounded with the loud noise of drums and gongs … looting and the ransacking of private homes … The violence of the Red Guards seemed to have escalated. … Articles in the newspapers … encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism. They were … exhorted to be fearless in their work of toppling the old world and building a new one based on Mao’s teachings.
-- Nien Cheng
 
The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the ‘Four Olds’: old culture, old customs, old habits, and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of ‘old’; it was left to the Red Guards to decide. First of all, they changed street names.
-- Nien Cheng
 
Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step.
-- Lord Chesterfield
 
It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
In the end it will not matter to us whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic--that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts -- the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other. ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone’s account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
Truth is sacred and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back. … The roots of the new heresy, God knows, are as deep as nature itself, whose power is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life. I say that the man who cannot see this cannot see the signs of the times; cannot see even the skysigns in the street that are the new sort of signs in heaven. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
If our social conditions curtail manhood and womanhood, we must alter the social conditions. We must not go on quietly in a corner making men unmanly and women unwomanly, that they may fit into their filthy and slavish civilization.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
 
The Rothschilds can start or prevent wars. Their word could make or break empires.
-- Chicago Evening American
 
David Rockefeller, President of Chase Manhattan Bank, briefed President Johnson today on his recent meeting with Premier Nikita Khrushchev of Russia.
-- Chicago Tribune
 
Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.
-- Lydia M. Child
 
England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland.
-- Lydia M. Child
 
Prefer a loss to a dishonest gain; for the one is painful but once, but the other for one's whole life.
-- Chilon of Sparta
 
Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.
-- Chinese Proverb
 
If you stand straight, do not fear a crooked shadow.
-- Chinese Proverb
 
Deal with the faults of others as gently as with your own.
-- Chinese Proverb
 
Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.
-- Chinese Proverb
 
The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.
-- Chinese Proverb
 
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever.
-- Chinese Proverb
 
Long before I was ordained a priest, I knew that my church was the most implacable enemy of this republic. My professors … had been unanimous in telling me that the principles and laws of the Church of Rome were absolutely antagonistic to the principles which are the foundation stones of the Constitution of the United States of America.
-- Charles Chiniquy
 
The federal criminal code currently includes more than 3,000 offenses and hardly a congressional session goes by without an attempt to add new sections.
-- Stephen Chippendale
 
It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.
-- Shirley Chisholm
 
In the United States, Sovereignty resides in the people, who act through the organs established by the Constitution.
-- Chisholm v. Georgia
 
What basic psychological distortion can be found in every civilization of which we know anything? The only psychological force capable of producing these perversions is morality - the concept of right and wrong. The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all of psychotherapy.
-- Dr. G. Brock Chisolm
 
To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men, their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas.
-- Dr. G. Brock Chisolm
 
The Act of Congress which we are impugning before you is communistic in its purposes and tendencies, and is defended here upon principles as communistic, socialistic - what shall I call them - populistic as ever have been addressed to any political assembly in the world.
-- Joseph H. Choate
 
Appropriated to justice, to security, to reason, to restraint; where there is no respect of persons; where will is nothing and power is nothing and numbers are nothing, and all are equal and all secure before the law.
-- Rufus Choate
 
At first it was the incomes of corporations, then of rich citizens, then of well-provided widows and opulent workers, and finally the wealth of housemaids and the tips of waitresses. This is all in line with the ability to pay doctrine. The poor, simply because there are more of them, have more ability to pay than the rich.
-- Frank Chodorov
 
If for no other reason, personal pride should prompt every governor and state legislator to take a secessionist attitude; they were not elected to be lackeys of the federal bureaucracy.
-- Frank Chodorov
 
Society thrives on trade simply because trade makes specialization possible, and specialization increases output, and increased output reduces the cost in toil for the satisfactions men live by. That being so, the market place is a most humane institution.
-- Frank Chodorov
 
Private capitalism makes a steam engine; State capitalism makes pyramids.
-- Frank Chodorov
 
Increasing the power of the state in response to the Soviet menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but bring it to the United States.
-- Frank Chodorov
 
The more subsidized it is, the less free it is. What is known as "free education" is the least free of all, for it is a state-owned institution; it is socialized education - just like socialized medicine or the socialized post office - and cannot possibly be separated from political control.
-- Frank Chodorov
 
Perhaps the removal of trade restrictions throughout the world would do more for the cause of universal peace than can any political union of peoples separated by trade barriers.
-- Frank Chodorov
 
[I]n America it is the so-called capitalist who is to blame for the fulfillment of Marx's prophecies. Beguiled by the state's siren song of special privilege, the capitalists have abandoned capitalism.
-- Frank Chodorov
 
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.
-- Noam Chomsky
 
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
-- Noam Chomsky
 
In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival.
-- Noam Chomsky
 
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
-- Noam Chomsky
 
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.
-- Noam Chomsky
 
From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought... Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things.
-- Noam Chomsky
 
In the late 19th century there was a major union organization, Knights of Labor, and also a radical populist movement based on farmers. It's hard to believe, but it was based in Texas, and it was quite radical. They wanted their own banks, their own cooperatives, their own control over sales and commerce.
-- Noam Chomsky
 
Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.
-- Noam Chomsky
 
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media.
-- Noam Chomsky
 
I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
-- Agatha Christie
 
Democracy is essentially coercive. The winner gets to use public authority to impose their policies on the losers.
-- John Chubb
 
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it has been said it is the quality which guarantees all others.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory -- victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But, it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good … and it would spread a lively terror.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Schools have not necessarily much to do with education... they are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! – of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
From the days of Spartacus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxenburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Truth is incontrovertible, ignorance can deride it, panic may resent it, malice may destroy it, but there it is.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Give me the facts, and I will twist them the way I want, to suit my argument.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
There are a lot of lies going around... and half of them are true.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
The price of greatness is responsibility.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
I am ready to meet my maker, but whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
I like a man who grins when he fights.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Everybody is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.  But if we fall, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world: 'We are still masters of our fate. We are still captain of our souls.'
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
I am in favor of deliberately spreading methodically prepared bacteria among people and animals -- mildew ... to destroy the harvests, anthrax to destroy horses and livestock, and the plague, in order to kill not only entire armies, but also the inhabitants of large regions.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
A fanatic is a person who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
 
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time -- a tremendous whack.
-- Winston Churchill
 
We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, Trial by Jury, and the English common law, find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.
-- Winston Churchill
 
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
-- Winston Churchill
 
In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound.
-- Winston Churchill
 
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
-- Winston Churchill
 
This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline.
-- Winston Churchill
 
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
-- Winston Churchill
 
The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charges known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments...Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilisation.
-- Winston Churchill
 
The public library is the most dangerous place in town.
-- John Ciardi
 
When you are aspiring to the highest place, it is honorable to reach the second or even the third rank.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
The more laws, the less justice.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
The men who administer public affairs must first of all see that everyone holds onto what is his, and that private men are never deprived of their goods by public men.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; the beasts, by nature.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
To freemen, threats are impotent. [Lat., Nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est.]
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts, a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading, a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
We are in bondage to the law in order that we may be free.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the new wonderful good society which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
When you have no basis for argument, abuse the plaintiff.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
To be ignorant of what happened before you were born... is to live the life of a child for ever.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
By doubting we all come at truth.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
The recovery of freedom is so splendid a thing that we must not shun even death when seeking to recover it.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
We are taxed in our bread and our wine, in our incomes and our investments, on our land and on our property not only for base creatures who do not deserve the name of men, but for foreign nations, complaisant nations who will bow to us and accept our largesse and promise us to assist in the keeping of the peace - these mendicant nations who will destroy us when we show a moment of weakness or our treasury is bare, and surely it is becoming bare! We are taxed to maintain legions on their soil, in the name of law and order and the Pax Romana, a document which will fall into dust when it pleases our allies and our vassals. We keep them in precarious balance only with our gold. Is the heartblood of our nation worth these? Were they bound to us with ties of love, they would not ask our gold. They take our very flesh, and they hate and despise us. And who shall say we are worthy of more? ... When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is an usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Endless money forms the sinews of war.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero (Questionable)
 
The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
 
Avoid any specific discussion of public policy at public meetings.
-- Quintus Tullius Cicero
 
During war, the laws are silent.
-- Quintus Tullius Cicero
 
Gravity is still just a theory, too. Would you like to test it by placing your neck beneath a guillotine?
-- Ralph Cicerone
 
Our major mistakes have not been the result of democracy, but of the erosion of democracy made possible by the mass media’s manipulation of public opinion.
-- Robert Cirino
 
When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed...
-- Civil Servants' Year Book
 
Les femmes sont tout à fait compétentes pour assurer leur légitime défense, pourvu que la loi ne les transforme pas en criminelles si elles emploient des moyens efficaces à cette fin." "Women are quite able to see to their own defence, as long as the law does not transform them into criminals if they take effective measures to do so.
-- Claire Joly, Marie Latourelle, Maryse Martin, and Karen Selick
 
There is nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitor.
-- Frank Clark
 
[The program of American disarmament outlined in State Department Paper 7277] is the fixed, determined and approved policy of the government of the United States.
-- Joseph S. Clark
 
The last damn thing blacks should do is get into the vanguard of banning books. The next step is banning blacks...
-- Dr. Kenneth Clark
 
Perhaps Communists had wormed their way so deeply into our government on both the working and planning levels that they were able to exercise an inordinate degree of power in shaping the course of America in the dangerous postwar era. I could not help wondering and worrying whether we were faced with open enemies across the conference table and hidden enemies who sat with us in our most secret councils.
-- General Mark Clark
 
A right is not what someone gives you; it's what no one can take from you.
-- Ramsey Clark
 
But we’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.
-- Ramsey Clark
 
Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to live in the United States.
-- Tom Clark
 
From the standpoint of freedom of speech and the press, it is enough to point out that the state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them... It is not the business of government to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine.
-- Justice Tom C. Clark
 
Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.
-- Justice Tom C. Clark
 
Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
 
Any smoothly functioning technology will have the appearence of magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
 
It is not uncommon for ignorant and corrupt men to falsely charge others with doing what they imagine they themselves, in their narrow minds and experience, would have done under the circumstances.
-- John Hessin Clarke
 
...there is no provision in the Charter itself that contemplates ending war. It is true the Charter provides for force to bring peace, but such use of force is itself war... The Charter is a war document not a peace document... Not only does the Charter Organization not prevent future wars, but it makes it practically certain that we shall have future wars, and as to such wars it takes from us the power to declare them, to choose the side on which we shall fight, to determine what forces and military equipment we shall use in the war, and to control and command our sons who do the fighting.
-- J. Reuben Clark, Jr.
 
He who wants peace must prepare for war.
-- Claudius
 
Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character.
-- Henry Clay
 
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.
-- Henry Clay
 
An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.
-- Henry Clay
 
I would rather be right than President.
-- Henry Clay
 
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to denigration without the usual interval of civilization.
-- Georges Clemenceau
 
War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.
-- Georges Clemenceau
 
I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.
-- Grover Cleveland
 
I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds... I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.
-- Grover Cleveland
 
I can find no warrant for such appropriation in the Constitution.
-- Grover Cleveland
 
Honor lies in honest toil.
-- Grover Cleveland
 
The best results in the operation of a government wherein every citizen has a share largely depend upon a proper limitation of the purely partisan zeal and effort and a correct appreciation of the time when the heat of the partisan should be merged in the patriotism of the citizen. ... At this hour the animosities of political strife, the bitterness of partisan defeat, and the exultation of partisan triumph should be supplanted by an ungrudging acquiescence in the popular will and a sober, conscientious concern for the general weal. ... Public extravagance begets extravagance among the people.
-- Grover Cleveland
 
A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
-- Grover Cleveland
 
When more of the people's sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government.
-- Grover Cleveland
 
For the problem of decision-making in our complicated world is not how to get the problem simple enough so that we can all understand it; the problem is how to get our thinking about the problem as complex as humanly possible--and thus approach (we can never match) the complexity of the real world around us.
-- Harlan Cleveland
 
It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
-- William Kingdon Clifford
 
All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.
-- William Kingdon Clifford
 
There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command, and that is the will to obey.
-- William Kingdon Clifford
 
There is no reason for anyone in this country -- anyone except a police officer or military person -- to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun. The only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns.
-- Bill Clinton (False)
 
The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people.
-- Bill Clinton (Questionable)
 
Every time Bush talks about trust it makes chills run up and down my spine. The way he has trampled on the truth is a travesty of the American political system.
-- Bill Clinton
 
When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly.... [However, now] there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it.
-- Bill Clinton
 
If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.
-- Bill Clinton
 
There's just no such thing as truth when it comes to him. He just says whatever sounds good and worries about it after the election.
-- Bill Clinton
 
When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans ... And so a lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it. That's what we did in the announcement I made last weekend on the public housing projects, about how we're going to have weapon sweeps and more things like that to try to make people safer in their communities.
-- Bill Clinton
 
The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.
-- Bill Clinton
 
No one wants to get this (Lewinsky) matter behind us more than I do, except maybe all the rest of the American people,
-- Bill Clinton
 
It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.
-- Bill Clinton
 
There are a lot of very brilliant people who believe that the nation-state is fast becoming a relic of the past.
-- Bill Clinton
 
We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans...
-- Bill Clinton
 
You can't say you love your country and hate your government.
-- Bill Clinton
 
I've said I've never broken the drug laws of my country, and that is the absolute truth.
-- Bill Clinton
 
A lot of wonderful people love their country and hate the military.
-- Bill Clinton
 
It depends on what the meaning of the word is. If the– if he– if "is" means is and never has been, that is not– that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.... Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.
-- Bill Clinton
 
I am here because I want to redefine the meaning of citizenship in America... If you’re asked in school ‘What does it mean to be a good citizen?’ I want the answer to be, ‘Well, to be a good citizen, you have to obey the law, you’ve got to go to work or be in school, you’ve got to pay your taxes and, oh, yes, you have to serve in your community to help make it a better place.’
-- Bill Clinton
 
Q.- "If you had it to do over again, would you inhale?" A.- "Sure, if I could... I tried before!
-- Bill Clinton
 
You know, by the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions. ... You may find you can get away with virtual presidents, virtual prime ministers, virtual everything.
-- Bill Clinton
 
African-Americans watch the same news at night that ordinary Americans do.
-- Bill Clinton
 
The road to tyranny, we must remember, begins with the destruction of the truth.
-- Bill Clinton
 
The Bush administration continues to coddle China, despite its continuing crackdown on democratic reform, its brutal subjugation of Tibet, its irresponsible export of nuclear and missile technology... Such forbearance on our part might have made sense during the Cold War when China was the counterweight to Soviet power. It makes no sense to play the China card now when our opponents have thrown in their hand.
-- Bill Clinton
 
You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say.
-- Bill Clinton
 
The other thing we have to do is to take seriously the role in this problem of...older men who prey on underage women...There are consequences to decisions and...one way or the other, people always wind up being held accountable.
-- Bill Clinton
 
We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans...
-- Bill Clinton
 
Nothing in the First Amendment converts our public schools into religion-free zones or requires all religious expression to be left behind at the schoolhouse door. … Government’s schools also may not discriminate against private religious expression during the school day.
-- Bill Clinton
 
The First Amendment does not require students to leave their religion at the schoolhouse door. … If students can wear T-shirts advertising sports teams, rock groups or politicians, they can also wear T-shirts that promote religion. … Religion is too important to our history and our heritage for us to keep it out of our schools.
-- Bill Clinton
 
Think! It ain't illegal 'yet.'
-- George Clinton
 
I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president.
-- Hillary Clinton
 
Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.
-- Hillary Clinton
 
We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society.
-- Hillary Clinton
 
God bless the America we are trying to create.
-- Hillary Clinton
 
We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.
-- Hillary Clinton
 
This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.
-- James Clyburn
 
This is revolution in reaction, as well as in radicalism, and Toryism speaking a jargon of law and order may often be a graver menace to liberty than radicalism bellowing the empty phrases of the soapbox demagogue.
-- Frank I. Cobb
 
The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority... It is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people.
-- Frank I. Cobb
 
If the author of the Declaration of Independence were to utter such a sentiment today, the Post Office Department could exclude him from the mail, grand juries could indict him for sedition and criminal syndicalism, legislative committees could seize his private papers ... and United States Senators would be clamoring for his deportation that he... should be sent back to live with the rest of the terrorists.
-- Frank I. Cobb
 
The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor.
-- William Cobbett
 
A committee can make a decision that is dumber than any of its members.
-- David B. Coblitz
 
The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the "high powers" delegated directly to the citizen, and 'is excepted out of the general powers of government.' A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power.
-- Cockrum v. State
 
The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the high powers delegated directly to the citizen, and is excepted out of the general powers of government. A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power.
-- Cockrum v. State
 
Absolute freedom does not exist; what does exist is the freedom to choose anything you like and then commit yourself to that decision.
-- Paulo Coelho
 
The person who is right is the person who is the strongest, in this case, paradoxically, it's the cowards who are the brave ones, and they manage to impose their ideas on everyone else.
-- Paulo Coelho
 
I join others who throughout history have recognized that an individual in this country has a protected right, within the confines of the criminal law, to guard his or her home or place of business from unlawful intrusions. ... Surely nothing could be more fundamental to the “concept of ordered liberty” than the basic right of an individual, within the confines of the criminal law, to protect his home and family from unlawful and dangerous intrusions.
-- John Louis Coffey
 
It has been said that the greatest threat to our liberty is from well-meaning, and almost imperceptible encroachments upon our personal freedom.
-- John Louis Coffey
 
The right to privacy is one of the most cherished rights an American citizen has; the right to privacy sets America apart from totalitarian states in which the interests of the state prevail over individual rights. A fundamental part of our concept of ordered liberty is the right to protect one’s home and family against dangerous intrusions subject to the criminal law.
-- John Louis Coffey
 
Prohibition ended in 1933 because the nation’s most influential people, as well as the general public, acknowledged that it had failed. It had increased lawlessness and drinking and aggravated alcohol abuse.
-- Thomas M. Coffey
 
Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human.
-- John Cogley
 
We must realize that our Party's most powerful weapon is racial tension. By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races, that for centuries have been oppressed by the Whites, we can mold them to the program of the Communist Party ... In America, we will aim for subtle victory. While enflaming the Negro minority against the Whites, we will instill in the Whites, a guilt complex for the exploitation of the Negroes. We will aid the Negroes to rise to prominence in every walk of life, in the professions, and in the world of sports and entertainment. With this prestige, the Negroes will be able to intermarry with the Whites, and begin a process which will deliver America to our cause.
-- Israel Cohen (Questionable)
 
Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.
-- Mark B. Cohen
 
The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubt.
-- Morris R. Cohen
 
Small groups or communities may be far more oppressive to the individual than larger ones. Men are in many ways freer in large cities than in small villages.
-- Morris R. Cohen
 
We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage by dealing with the issues and subjects we choose to deal with.
-- Richard M. Cohen
 
Terrorism is escalating to the point that Americans soon may have to choose between civil liberties and more intrusive means of protection.
-- William S. Cohen
 
We have to yet really seriously debate the constitutional issues and whether or not we're willing to give up more freedom in order to have more security.
-- William S. Cohen
 
The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.
-- Jean Baptiste Colbert
 
I have found some of the best reasons I ever had for remaining at the bottom simply by looking at the men at the top.
-- Frank Moore Colby
 
The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.
-- William Colby
 
The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government.
-- William Colby
 
But what is Freedom? Rightly understood, A universal licence to be good.
-- Hartley Coleridge
 
Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 
I have seen gross intolerance show in support of tolerance.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 
A people are free in proportion as they form their own opinions.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 
If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 
Two hundred ten years ago, the people who drafted our Bill of Rights decided that banning books wasn't the way to handle disagreements. They thought the best thing was more speech. It is a pity that county commissioners in 2002 don't agree.
-- Matt Coles
 
The core issue here is not whether you agree or disagree with the commissioners about gay people. It is whether you think the answer to a disagreement is to yank the words of anyone who disagrees with them out of the library.
-- Matt Coles
 
While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny.
-- Rev. Nicholas Collin
 
Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.
-- Robin George Collingwood
 
Perfect Freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work, and in that work does what he wants to do.
-- R. G. Collingwood
 
By freethinking I mean the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence.
-- Anthony Collins
 
The right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall be called in question; but nothing herein contained shall be construed to justify the practice of carrying concealed weapons.
-- Colorado Constitution
 
A governmental purpose to control or prevent certain activities, which may be constitutionally subject to state or municipal regulation under the police power, may not be achieved by means which sweep unnecessarily broadly and thereby invade the area of protected freedoms. Even though the governmental purpose may be legitimate and substantial, that purpose cannot be pursued by means that broadly stifle fundamental personal liberties when the end can be more narrowly achieved.
-- Colorado Supreme Court
 
The 1st Amendment embraces the individual's right to purchase and read whatever books she wishes to, without fear the government will take steps to discover which books she buys, reads, and intends to read.
-- Colorado Supreme Court
 
[The state] cannot disarm any class of persons or deprive them of the right guaranteed under section 13, article 2 of the Constitution, to bear arms in defense of home, person, and property. The guaranty thus extended is meaningless if any person is denied the right to possess arms for such protection....
-- Colorado Supreme Court
 
To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
 
Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
 
He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
 
Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty; it is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
 
The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
 
[W]e are living in a sick Society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbors but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them.
-- William Comer
 
America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation.
-- Henry Steele Commager
 
Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.
-- Henry Steele Commager
 
Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion... In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.
-- Henry Steele Commager
 
Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past while we silence the rebels of the present.
-- Henry Steele Commager
 
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
-- Henry Steele Commager
 
A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas.
-- Henry Steele Commager
 
Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment.
-- Henry Steele Commager
 
The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them.
-- Henry Steele Commager
 
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
-- Henry Steele Commager
 
Lawyers are being graduated from our law schools by the thousands who have little knowledge of the Constitution. When  organizations seek a lawyer to instruct them on the Constitution, they find it nearly impossible to secure one competent.
-- Committee on American Citizenship
 
We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists.... We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists.
-- Communist Party Education Workers Congress
 
Communist Rules for Revolution...
-- Communist Rules for Revolution (Questionable)
 
[When] Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology, why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?
-- Auguste Comte
 
Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. ... Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral. Since there are no divine rights anymore, this concept must therefore disappear completely as related only to the preliminary regime and totally inconsistent with the final state where there are only duties based on functions.
-- Auguste Comte
 
Diversity of opinion within the framework of loyalty to our free society is not only basic to a university but to the entire nation.
-- James Bryant Conant
 
Eight days after taking over the reins of his country, a beloved leader urged everyone to turn in their arms - “There is no longer an enemy,” he said. A slogan, “Arms—What For?” appeared throughout the nation. Thirty days later he ordered his militia to turn in their arms. Promised elections are cancelled, the loved leader becomes a tyrant and his people lose all rights, including freedom of speech and press, becoming a totalitarian state for the next 35 years. For those Americans currently willing to agree to have some of their rights curtailed for temporary security, I’d urge them to look south -- to Cuba.
-- Yvonne M. Conde
 
Nobody should be compelled to respect an ideology that doesn’t respect them.
-- Pat Condell
 
He who will not economize will have to agonize.
-- Confucius
 
If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.
-- Confucius
 
Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.
-- Confucius
 
The superior man cannot be known in little matters, but he may be entrusted with great concerns. The small man may not be entrusted with great concerns, but he may be known in little matters.
-- Confucius
 
Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Let me do and I understand.
-- Confucius
 
To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.
-- Confucius
 
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
-- Confucius
 
The superior man understands what is right. The inferior man understands what is popular.
-- Confucius
 
By nature men are pretty much alike; it is learning and practice that set them apart.
-- Confucius
 
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
-- Confucius
 
No mask like open truth to cover lies,\\As to go naked is the best disguise.
-- William Congreve
 
Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.
-- Connecticut Constitution
 
You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
-- Joseph Conrad
 
Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning toward error.
-- Joseph Conrad
 
Thus arbitrary power will have divided men of superior intelligence into two groups: the former will be seditious, the latter corrupt...
-- Benjamin Constant
 
No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being...
-- Benjamin Constant
 
First ask yourselves, Gentlemen, what an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a citizen of the United States of America understand today by the word 'liberty'. For each of them it is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death nor maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone's right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they or their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is more compatible with their inclinations or whims. Finally, it is everyone's right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed. Now compare this liberty with that of the ancients. The latter consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgments; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them. But if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community.
-- Benjamin Constant
 
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.
-- Constitution for the United States
 
We the People of the united States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, 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.
-- Constitution for the USA
 
In all criminal cases whatsoever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts.
-- Indiana Constitution
 
Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms; and this right shall never be questioned.
-- Maine Constitution
 
The people have a right to keep and bear arms for the common defense. And as, in times of peace, armies are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be maintained without the consent of the Legislature; and the military power shall always be held in an exact subordination to the Civil authority, and be governed by it.
-- Massachusetts Constitution
 
Every person has a right to keep and bear arms for the defense of himself and the state.
-- Michigan Constitution
 
The right of any person to keep or bear arms in defense of his own home, person, and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall not be called in question, but nothing herein contained shall be held to permit the carrying of concealed weapons.
-- Montana Constitution
 
Every citizen has the right to keep and bear arms for security and defense, for lawful hunting and recreational use and for other lawful purposes.
-- Nevada Constitution
 
All persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state.
-- New Hampshire Constitution
 
The doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
-- New Hampshire Constitution
 
All lawful authority comes from God to the people.
-- Constitution of the Irish Free State
 
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury... nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb, nor shall be compelled in any Criminal Case to be a witness against himself, not be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
-- Constitution of the United States
 
Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.
-- Constitution of UNESCO
 
That the people have a right to freedom of speech, and of writing, and publishing their sentiments; therefore, the freedom of the press ought not to be restrained.
-- Pennsylvania Constitution
 
The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government...
-- U. S. Constitution
 
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
-- U.S. Constitution
 
America is a country in which I see the most persistant idealism and the blandest of cynicism and the race is on between its vitality and its decadence.
-- Alistair Cooke
 
As for the rage to believe that we have found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on, this seems to me a disastrous sentimentality, which, whatever liberties it sets loose, loosens also the cement that alone can bind society into a stable compound -- a code of obeyed taboos. I can only recall the saying of a wise Frenchman that `liberty is the luxury of self-discipline.' Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty -- and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country -- a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism -- the race is on between its decadence and its vitality.
-- Alistair Cooke
 
Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others.
-- Alistair Cooke
 
Fidelity to the public requires that the laws be as plain and explicit as possible, that the less knowing may understand, and not be ensnared by them, while the artful evade their force.
-- Samuel Cooke
 
So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.
-- Charles Horton Cooley
 
We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: “I can’t fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about.” Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility -- blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty.
-- Marvin Cooley
 
I will no longer pay for the destruction of my country, family, and self. Damn tyranny! Damn the Federal Reserve liars and thieves! Damn all pettifogging, oath-breaking US attorneys and judges.… I will see you all in Hell and shed my blood before I will be robbed of one more dollar to finance a national policy of treason, plunder, and corruption
-- Marvin Cooley
 
The right is general. It may be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. The militia, as has been explained elsewhere, consists of those persons who, under the law, are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. . . . [I]f the right were limited to those enrolled, the purpose of the guarantee might be defeated altogether by the action or the neglect to act of the government it was meant to hold in check. The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for that purpose.
-- Thomas Cooley
 
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. The wise and correct course to follow in taxation is not to destroy those who have already secured success, but to create conditions under which everyone will have a better chance to be successful.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
No matter what anyone may say about making the rich and the corporations pay taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
When more and more people are thrown out of work, unemployment results.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
We do not need more intellectual power, we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge, we need more character. We do not need more government, we need more culture. We do not need more law, we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen, we need more of the things that are unseen.... If the foundation is firm, the superstructure will stand.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
Nothing is easier than spending public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts.... Self-government means self-reliance.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
Nature is inexorable. If men do not follow the truth they cannot live.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
As I went about with my father, when he collected taxes, I knew that when taxes were laid someone had to work hard to earn the money to pay them.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
Government price-fixing once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
A wholesome regard for the memory of the great men of long ago is the best assurance to a people of a continuation of great men to come, who shall be able to instruct, to lead, and to inspire. A people who worship at the shrine of true greatness will themselves be truly great.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
Unless the people, through unified action, arise and take charge of their government, they will find that their government has taken charge of them. Independence and liberty will be gone, and the general public will find itself in a condition of servitude to an aggregation of organized and selfish interest.
-- Calvin Coolidge
 
Reason and virtue alone can bestow liberty.
-- Anthony Ashley Cooper
 
Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a free man. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.
-- James Fenimore Cooper
 
The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority. Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals.
-- James Fenimore Cooper
 
Liberty is not a matter of words, but a positive and important condition of society. Its greatest safeguard after placing its foundations in a popular base, is in the checks and balances imposed on the public servants.
-- James Fenimore Cooper
 
It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly-prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong.
-- James Fenimore Cooper
 
Commerce is entitled to a complete and efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes to control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high principles of natural justice that ought to lie at the root of every political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked.
-- James Fenimore Cooper
 
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
-- James Fenimore Cooper
 
Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals.
-- James Fenimore Cooper
 
An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.
-- Col. Jeff Cooper
 
An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.
-- Jeff Cooper
 
The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power.
-- Thomas Cooper
 
Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.
-- Thomas Cooper
 
When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback.
-- Bill Copeland
 
Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the Universe. All this is suggested by the systematic procession of events and the harmony of the whole Universe, if only we face the facts, as they say, `with both eyes open'.
-- Copernicus
 
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.
-- Alan Corenk
 
Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.
-- II Corinthians
 
Censorship is contagious, and experience with this culture of regulation teaches us that regulatory enthusiasts herald each new medium of communications as another opportunity to spread the disease.
-- Robert Corn-Revere
 
Do your duty, and leave the rest to heaven.
-- Pierre Corneille
 
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
-- Bill Cosby
 
He [a U.S. Senator] knows he's got to buy time on my radio station, so he's going to lend me an ear. We're keeping them alive back home and that's why the newspaper and radio and TV people are more effective lobbyists.
-- Joseph Costello
 
If you pinch the sea of its liberty, though it be walls of stone or brass, it will beat them down.
-- John Cotton
 
In the Jim Crow South, for example, government failed and indeed refused to protect blacks from extra-legal violence. Given our history, it's stunning we fail to question those who would force upon us a total reliance on the state for defense.
-- Robert J. Cottrol
 
In education markets, like the Asian tutoring industry, top teachers are superstars who get to design curricula for thousands or even millions of students and train scores or hundreds of other teachers to use their effective methods. Quality providers expand and are emulated by competitors, and there is a powerful incentive for meaningful innovation. ... One teacher in Korea’s private tutoring sector made $2 million last year because his web-based employer has profit sharing and he’s brilliant at what he does, so he gets tons of students. That’s what should have happened to [Jaime] Escalante. That’s the sort of success that should greet excellence in education at all levels. It doesn’t because we don’t have a market.
-- Andrew J. Coulson
 
[A] possible further difficulty is cited, namely, that arising from the Constitutional provision that only Congress may declare war. This argument is countered with the contention that a treaty will override this barrier, let alone the fact that our participation in such police action as might be recommended by the international security organization need not necessarily be construed as war.
-- Council on Foreign Relations
 
The sovereignty fetish is still so strong in the public mind, that there would appear to be little chance of winning popular assent to American membership in anything approaching a super-state organization. Much will depend on the kind of approach which is used in further popular education.
-- Council on Foreign Relations
 
Some suggested over the weekend that it's wrong to expect Elian Gonzalez to live in a place that tolerates no dissent or freedom of political expression. They were talking about Miami.
-- Katie Couric
 
We consistently have adhered to the principle that the will of the people is the paramount consideration. Our goal today…[is] to reach the result that reflects the will of the voters…. The laws are intended to facilitate and safeguard the right of each voter to express his or her will in the context of our representative democracy. Technical statutory requirements must not be exalted over the substance of this right.
-- Florida Supreme Court
 
The nearer the power to enact laws and control public servants lies with the great body of the people, the more nearly does a government take unto itself the form of a republic -- not in name alone, but in fact.
-- Oregon Supreme Court
 
If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable.
-- Georges Courteline
 
History is a vast early warning system.
-- Norman Cousins
 
A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas – a place where history comes to life.
-- Norman Cousins
 
I cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both. Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth.
-- Norman Cousins
 
Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside of ourselves will affect us.
-- Steven R. Covey
 
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
-- Steven R. Covey
 
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
-- Richard Cowan
 
It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
-- Noël Coward
 
It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.
-- Noel Coward
 
I've over-educated myself in all the things I shouldn't have known.
-- Noel Coward
 
The liberty of a people consists in being governed by laws which they have made themselves, under whatsoever form it be of government; the liberty of a private man, in being master of his own time and actions, as far as may consist with the laws of God and of his country.
-- Abraham Cowley
 
Life is an incurable disease.
-- Abraham Cowley
 
Then liberty, like day,\\ Breaks on the soul,\\ and by a flash from Heaven\\ Fires all the faculties with glorious joy.
-- William Cowper
 
But slaves that once conceive the glowing thought\\ Of freedom, in that hope itself possess\\ All that the contest calls for; spirit, strength,\\ The scorn of danger, and united hearts,\\ The surest presage of the good they seek.
-- William Cowper
 
Absence of occupation is not rest,\\A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd.
-- William Cowper
 
'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower\\ Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;\\ And we are weeds without it.
-- William Cowper
 
No, Freedom has a thousand charms to show\\ That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.
-- William Cowper
 
He is the freeman whom the truth makes free.
-- William Cowper
 
He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, And all are slaves besides.
-- William Cowper
 
To follow foolish precedents, and wink\\ With both our eyes, is easier than to think.
-- William Cowper
 
Freedom has a thousand charms to show,\\ That slaves, howe'er contented, never know.
-- William Cowper
 
It is always the task of the intellectual to “think otherwise.” This is not just a perverse idiosyncrasy. It is an absolutely essential feature of a society.
-- Harvey Cox
 
The holier-than-thou activists who blame the population for not spending more money on their personal crusades are worse than aggravating. They encourage the repudiation of personal responsibility by spreading the lie that support of a government program fulfills individual moral duty.
-- Patrick Cox
 
The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the 'state' from 'society'.
-- Stephen Cox
 
The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army,  must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
-- Tench Coxe
 
The militia, who are in fact the effective part of the people at large, will render many troops quite unnecessary. They will form a powerful check upon the regular troops, and will generally be sufficient to over-awe them
-- Tench Coxe
 
As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them.
-- Tench Coxe
 
Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ... the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.
-- Tench Coxe
 
Whereas civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as military forces, which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.
-- Tench Coxe
 
Democracy needs more free speech for even the speech of foolish people is valuable if it serves to guarantee the right of the wise to talk.
-- David Cushman Coyle
 
[T]here are, at bottom, basically two ways to order social affairs, Coercively, through the mechanisms of the state -- what we can call political society. And voluntarily, through the private interaction of individuals and associations -- what we can call civil society. ... In a civil society, you make the decision. In a political society, someone else does. ... Civil society is based on reason, eloquence, and persuasion, which is to say voluntarism. Political society, on the other hand, is based on force.
-- Edward H. Crane
 
The Great Depression was not caused by laissez faire but by the actions of well-intended politicians and bureaucrats. The Federal Reserve System, after all, was not created in response to the Great Depression, but in 1913. Soon thereafter it began experimenting with its awesome powers, expanding the money supply during the roaring ‘20s, propping up the pound sterling in London, extending credit so Europeans could buy American agricultural products. All the while, Congress was becoming more and more protectionist. When the Fed reversed policies in 1929 and actually shrunk the money supply by a third over the next three years and Congress culminated its protectionist tendencies with the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the collapse was underway. The fact that Hoover then raised taxes and Roosevelt kept wages artificially high guaranteed the massive unemployment that marked the 1930s. Government caused and exacerbated the Great Depression.
-- Edward H. Crane
 
Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, of course, lays out the delegated, enumerated, and therefore limited powers of Congress. Only through a deliberate misreading of the general welfare and commerce clauses of the Constitution has the federal government been allowed to overreach its authority and extend its tendrils into every corner of civil society.
-- Edward H. Crane
 
In the United States there is no phenomenon more threatening to popular government than the unwillingness of newspapers to give the facts to their readers.
-- Nelson Antrim Crawford
 
The impact of Zenger [the trial of John Zenger] on the American colonies was dramatic. Every jurisdiction which confronted the issue of the jury’s right to decide the law as well as the facts reached the same conclusion: American juries had the right to decide the law.
-- M. Kristine Creagan
 
Jury nullification is a doctrine based on the concept that “jurors have the inherent right to set aside the instructions of the judge and to reach a verdict of acquittal based upon their own consciences, and the defendant has the right to be so instructed.” Though jury nullification may seem like a shocking proposal today, it is by no means a new idea. In fact, jury nullification was first espoused nearly three and one half centuries ago.
-- M. Kristine Creagan
 
Things in law tend to be black and white. But we all know that some people are a little bit guilty, while other people are guilty as hell.
-- Donald R. Cressey
 
I operate under the assumption that the mass media will never be accurate. ... It operates with the objective to simplify and exaggerate, which is exactly what Walt Disney told his cartoonists.
-- Dr. Michael Crichton
 
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
-- Michael Crichton
 
What censorship accomplishes, creating an unreal and hypocritical mythology, fomenting an attraction for forbidden fruit, inhibiting the creative minds among us and fostering an illicit trade. Above all, it curtails the right of the individual, be he creator or consumer, to satisfy his intellect and his interest without harm. In our law-rooted society, we are not the keeper of our brother’s morals – only of his rights.
-- Judith Crist
 
Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human... No people will be truly free till all are free.
-- Benedetto Croce
 
I leave this rule for others when I'm dead, Be always sure you're right -- then go ahead.
-- Davy Crockett
 
We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not attempt to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.
-- Davy Crockett
 
We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money.
-- Davy Crockett
 
There ain't no ticks like poly-ticks. Bloodsuckers all.
-- Davy Crockett
 
I want people to be able to get what they need to live: enough food, a place to live, and an education for their children. Government does not provide these as well as private charities and businesses.
-- Davy Crockett
 
The First Amendment was never intended to insulate our public institutions from any mention of God, the Bible or religion. When such insulation occurs, another religion, such as secular humanism, is effectively established.
-- Crockett v. Sorenson
 
It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it.
-- Oliver Cromwell
 
News reporters are certainly liberal and left of center.
-- Walter Cronkite
 
It is a seldom proffered argument as to the advantages of a free press that it has a major function in keeping the government itself informed as to what the government is doing.
-- Walter Cronkite
 
When law enforcers are shown to have such unswerving integrity, only the most churlish among us would question the methods they use to “get their man.” Constitutional guarantees are regarded as bothersome “technicalities” that impede honest law enforcers in the performance of their duties.
-- Donna Woolfolk Cross
 
It's important to understand that the idea of political correctness, from its inception, was designed as a political weapon to silence voices of dissent ... today’s social media outrage can be tomorrow’s laws.
-- Steven Crowder
 
This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you... Hate speech is inextricably tied to political correctness, or Cultural Marxism, and that creates intellectual conformity -- or intellectual authoritarianism. And that’s where you start to see things like “safe spaces” or “trigger warnings” or speakers banned from campus, or people with unpopular opinions banned from social media.
-- Steven Crowder
 
This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you...
-- Steven Crowder
 
Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.
-- Ellwood P. Cubberley
 
There is a de facto “secret government” operating nationally and internationally and involved in the highest circles of the U.S. government, exercising an impact over domestic policies and economics ranging between extreme influence to, at times, outright control. This extreme influence to outright control naturally includes the Presidency. The de facto “secret government,” much of whose intellectual—and financial—muscle are to be found in the New York office of the CFR, the great tax-free foundations, and certain international firms and corporations.
-- Mike Culbert
 
We don't know who discovered water, but we are certain it wasn't a fish.
-- John Culkin
 
To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
-- e. e. cummings
 
Only the rare taxpayer would be likely to know that he could refuse to produce his records to IRS agents... Who would believe the ironic truth that the cooperative taxpayer fares much worse than the individual who relies upon his constitutional rights.
-- Judge Walter Joseph Cummings Jr.
 
It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.
-- John Philpot Curran
 
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
-- John Philpot Curran
 
A person's right to a job is as specious as his boss' right to success in business. There is no right to a minimum wage, just as there is no right to success in self-employment.
-- Rex Curry
 
There can be no crime, there can be no misdemeanor without a law written or unwritten, express or implied.
-- Benjamin Curtis
 
A greater principle is at stake than the fate of any particular president
-- Benjamin Curtis
 
Treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors are high crimes, other high crimes and misdemeanors must be akin to treason and bribery.
-- Benjamin Curtis
 
My first position is that when Congress speaks of treason, bribery, and other crimes and misdemeanors, it refers to and includes only high criminal offenses against the United States made so by some law of the United States existing when the acts complained of were done. And I say that this is plainly to be inferred from each and every one of the provisions of the constitution on the subject of impeachment.
-- Benjamin Curtis
 
The big thieves hang the little ones.
-- Czech Proverb
 
Depressed? Of course we're all depressed. We've been so quickly, violently, and irreconcilably plucked from nature, from physical labor, from kinship and village mentality, from every natural and primordial anti-depressant. The further society "progresses," the grander the scale of imbalance. Just as fluoride is put in water to prevent dental caries, we'll soon find government mandating Prozac in our water to prevent mental caries.
-- M. Robin D'Antan
 
Collectivist ethical principle: man is not an end to himself, but is only a tool to serve the ends of others. Whether those 'others' are a dictator's gang, the nation, society, the race, (the) god(s), the majority, the community, the tribe, etc., is irrelevant -- the point is that man in principle must be sacrificed to others.
-- Mark Da Cunha
 
In principle, there are only two fundamental political viewpoints. That is, two contradictory ends of the 'political spectrum.' Those two principles are freedom and slavery.
-- Mark Da Cunha
 
Collectivism, unlike individualism, holds the group as the primary, and the standard of moral value.
-- Mark Da Cunha
 
Positive laws are tyrannical. One's individual rights -- whether they be life, liberty, or property -- must be sacrificed by the state in order to fulfill the positive rights of another. For example, if housing is considered a "right," then the state will have to confiscate wealth (property) from those who have provided shelter for themselves in order to house those who have not. ... True justice is realized when our lives, and property are secure, and we are free to express our thoughts without fear of retribution. Just laws are negative in nature; they exist to thwart the violation of our natural rights. Government ought to be the collective organization -- that is, the extension -- of the individual's right of self-defense, and its purpose to protect our lives, liberties, and property.
-- Mark Da Vee
 
The desire to know is natural to good men.
-- Leonardo da Vinci
 
One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
-- Leonardo da Vinci
 
It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
-- Leonardo Da Vinci
 
Anyone who argues by referring to authority is not using his mind but rather his memory.
-- Leonardo da Vinci
 
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
-- Leonardo Da Vinci
 
I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: "Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?
-- Leonardo da Vinci
 
It takes a long time to understand nothing.
-- Edward Dahlberg
 
Today, The Daily Telegraph starts its 'A Free Country' campaign. Week by week, and in major individual investigations, we shall examine how freedom is being taken away, whether by Westminster or Whitehall or Brussels or any other authority. We shall try to annoy the control freaks, whether they are Right, Left or Centre, and we shall welcome allies for freedom from all quarters. The Conservative leadership contestants hardly breathe a word about freedom. The Labour Government's Queen's Speech is a shopping list of attacks on our liberties. There's plenty to do. Libertad o muerte!
-- Daily Telegraph
 
If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.
-- Dalai Lama
 
The police are not here to create disorder. The police are here to preserve disorder.
-- Mayor Richard Daley
 
...it was the calculated 'shearing' of the public by the World-Money powers triggered by the planned sudden shortage of call money in the New York Market.
-- Curtis Dall
 
...Most of his thoughts, his political 'ammunition,'...were carefully manufactured for him in advance by the CFR-One World Money group. Brilliantly... he exploded that prepared 'ammunition' in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people--and thus paid off and retained his internationalist political support.
-- Curtis Dall
 
Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. 
-- Theodore Dalrymple
 
There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.
-- William Damon
 
Our experience has shown us that in the excitement of great popular elections, deciding the policy of the country, and its vast patronage, frauds will be committed, if a chance is given for them. If these frauds are allowed, the result is not only that the popular will may be defeated, and the result falsified, but that the worst side will prevail. The side which has the greater number of dishonest men will poll the most votes. The war cry, "Vote early and vote often!" and the familiar problem, "how to cast the greatest number of votes with the smallest number of voters", indicate the direction in which the dangers lie.
-- Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
 
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
-- Frank Dane
 
I have never seen more senators express discontent with their jobs. ... I think the major cause is that, deep down in our hearts, we have been accomplices to doing something terrible and unforgivable to this wonderful country. Deep down in our hearts, we know that we have bankrupted America and that we have given our children a legacy of bankruptcy. ... We have defrauded our country to get ourselves elected.
-- John C. Danforth
 
It is up to you to decide whether or not you’re ready to be free, really free. This pertains to your relationship as well as your activities in the world. You are limitless, if you choose that! Your freedom comes from letting go. Freedom means empowerment to be, do, go, feel, whatever your heart tells you. Only you have kept yourself from having this freedom out of some misunderstanding of what your responsibilities really are. Your responsibilities are to your Self. Serve that truly, fully, and you serve All.
-- Alma Daniel
 
Every private citizen has a public responsibility.
-- Myra Janco Daniels
 
He who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning.
-- Danish Proverb
 
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
-- Dante
 
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
The best that we can do is to be kindly and helpful toward our friends and fellow passengers who are clinging to the same speck of dirt while we are drifting side by side to our common doom.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. From him who will not give her all, she will have nothing. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private school . . . At the next session you may ban books and newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
There is no such thing as justice -- in or out of court.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith.
-- Clarence S. Darrow
 
To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.
-- Charles Darwin
 
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
-- Charles Darwin
 
The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.
-- Charles Darwin
 
The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal.
-- Charles Darwin
 
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
-- Charles Darwin
 
Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic -- why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students.
-- Steve Dasbach
 
If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible.
-- Ram Dass
 
When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.
-- James Dale Davidson
 
The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless.
-- James Dale Davidson
 
So low and hopeless are the finances of the United States, that, the year before last Congress was obliged to borrow money even, to pay the interest of the principal which we had borrowed before. This wretched resource of turning interest into principal, is the most humiliating and disgraceful measure that a nation could take, and approximates with rapidity to absolute ruin: Yet it is the inevitable and certain consequence of such a system as the existing Confederation.
-- William Richardson Davie
 
The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence; as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority.
-- Justice David Davis
 
The Republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it ... This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.
-- Elmer Davis
 
This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle – among others – that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error; that in the competition of the marketplace of ideas, the sounder ideas will in the long run win out.
-- Elmer Davis
 
The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it.
-- Elmer Davis
 
Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.
-- Jefferson Davis
 
It is ironic that our government, which has been relentlessly critical of the messages that popular culture imparts to our youth, would seek to silence an artist who uses the medium of hip hop to preach a message of self respect and self reliance to young women and girls.
-- Lisa E. Davis
 
Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.
-- Manuel Garcia O'Kelly Davis
 
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
-- Richard Dawkins
 
You know your country is dying when you have to make a distinction between what is moral and ethical, and what is legal.
-- John De Armond
 
There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
-- Honoré de Balzac
 
Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.
-- Honore de Balzac
 
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
-- Honore de Balzac
 
I claim for the nation an education that depends only on the State, because children of the State must be raised by members of the State.
-- Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais
 
It is the part of wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket.
-- Miguel de Cervantes
 
Society is composed of two great classes - those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.
-- Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort
 
The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of pleasures.
-- Luc de Clapiers
 
Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license,” and they will define freedom out of existence.
-- Voltarine de Cleyre
 
The revolution is ... the blow dealt ... against the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty.
-- Voltarine de Cleyre
 
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
-- Charles de Gaulle
 
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.
-- Charles De Gaulle
 
I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
-- Charles De Gaulle
 
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
-- Charles de Gaulle
 
The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.
-- Remy De Gourmont
 
Money is the sign of liberty. To curse money is to curse liberty -- to curse life, which is nothing, if it be not free.
-- Remy de Gourmont
 
A large number of people, certainly the majority of the political looter class, think the best way to deal with the rapidly deepening economic crisis is via 'stimulus packages' with money plucked off the magic money tree... which is to say, by trying to re-inflate the credit bubble that actually caused the crisis. This is a bit like treating alcoholics by urging them to buy more whiskey.
-- Perry de Havilland
 
I have often lamented that with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the forces of liberalism did not spend nearly enough time ruthlessly driving intellectual stakes through the hearts of all those who supported the 'Evil Empire' or preached appeasement or claimed that the Soviet system was 'just another way of living' rather than a mass murderous tyranny.
-- Perry de Havilland
 
The Radical Centre seem to have the same obsession with control that the fascists and communists had, but unlike them, it is control for control's sake rather than in the service of some clear ideology ... They do not seek the triumph of Volk or the dictatorship of the proletariat, they just seek to replace all social interactions with politically mediated interactions. They seek to regulate everything via a total state that ... just wants a world in which nothing whatsoever is private, everything is political. Their symbol is not the Hammer and Sickle or the Swastika, it is the CCTV camera.
-- Perry de Havilland
 
... the smaller the domain where choices among alternatives are made collectively, the smaller will be the probability that any individual's preference gets overruled.
-- Anthony de Jasay
 
People who live in states have as a rule never experienced the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical possibility of moving from the one to the other ... On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses about the relative merits of state and state of nature? ... My contention here is that preferences for political arrangements of society are to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that political institutions are either addictive like some drugs, or allergy-inducing like some others, or both, for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others.
-- Anthony de Jasay
 
Self-imposed limits on sovereign power can disarm mistrust, but provide no guarantee of liberty and property beyond those afforded by the balance between state and private force.
-- Anthony de Jasay
 
In the process of helping some (perhaps most) people to more utility and justice, the state imposes on civil society a system of interdictions and commands.
-- Anthony de Jasay
 
Having gathered all power to itself, [the State] has become the sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure.
-- Anthony de Jasay
 
People who live in states have as a rule never experienced the state of nature and vice-versa, and have no practical possibility of moving from the one to the other ... On what grounds, then, do people form hypotheses about the relative merits of state and state of nature? ... My contention here is that preferences for political arrangements of society are to a large extent produced by these very arrangements, so that political institutions are either addictive like some drugs, or allergy-inducing like some others, or both, for they may be one thing for some people and the other for others.
-- Anthony de Jasay
 
Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel
 
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel
 
A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel
 
The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.
-- Bertrand de Jouvenel
 
It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.
-- Estienne de la Boétie
 
However, there is satisfaction in examining what they get out of all this torment, what advantage they derive from all the trouble of their wretched existence. Actually the people never blame the tyrant for the evils they suffer, but they do place responsibility on those who influence him; peoples, nations, all compete with one another, even the peasants, even the tillers of the soil, in mentioning the names of the favorites, in analyzing their vices, and heaping upon them a thousand insults, a thousand obscenities, a thousand maledictions. All their prayers, all their vows are directed against these persons; they hold them accountable for all their misfortunes, their pestilences, their famines; and if at times they show them outward respect, at those very moments they are fuming in their hearts and hold them in greater horror than wild beasts. This is the glory and honor heaped upon influential favorites for their services by people who, if they could tear apart their living bodies, would still clamor for more, only half satiated by the agony they might behold. For even when the favorites are dead those who live after are never too lazy to blacken the names of these people-eaters with the ink of a thousand pens, tear their reputations into bits in a thousand books, and drag, so to speak, their bones past posterity, forever punishing them after their death for their wicked lives.
-- Estienne de la Boétie
 
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.
-- Étienne de la Boétie
 
A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob; an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen.
-- Jean de la Bruyere
 
A wise man neither suffers himself to be governed, nor attempts to govern others.
-- Jean de la Bruyere
 
O liberty! how many crimes are committed in thy name! [Fr., O liberte! que de crimes on commet dans ton nom!]
-- Madame Jeanne Marie Phlipon de La Platiere Roland
 
Everyone complains of his memory, none of his judgment.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
 
Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
 
We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
 
Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
 
Love of justice in the generality of men is only the fear of suffering from injustice.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
 
Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
 
Nothing is given so profusely as advice.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
 
Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
 
A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.
-- François Duc de La Rochefoucauld
 
Republicanism and ignorance are in bitter antagonism.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine
 
Void of freedom, what would virtue be?
-- Alphonse de Lamartine
 
At twenty every one is republican.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine
 
There is in human affairs one order which is best. That order is not always the one which exists; but it is the order which should exist for the greatest good of humanity. God knows, it and will it: man's duty it is to discover and establish it.
-- Emile Louis Victor de Laveleye
 
No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies.
-- Salvador de Madariaga
 
He is free who knows how to keep in his own hands the power to decide at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power.
-- Salvador De Madariaga
 
He is free who knows how to keep in his own hand the power to decide, at each step, the course of his life, and who lives in a society which does not block the exercise of that power.
-- Salvador de Madariaga
 
Every nation gets the government it deserves.
-- Joseph de Maistre
 
To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.
-- Michel De Montaigne
 
It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration -- nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.
-- Michel De Montaigne
 
A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.
-- Michel de Montaigne
 
I will follow the right side even to the fire, but excluding the fire if I can.
-- Michel de Montaigne
 
Laws are maintained in credit, not because they are essentially just, but because they are laws. It is the mystical foundation of their authority; they have none other.
-- Michel de Montaigne
 
Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another's net.
-- Michel De Montaigne
 
I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.
-- Michel de Montaigne
 
A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom.
-- Michel De Montaigne
 
If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
-- Michel De Montaigne
 
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.
-- Michel de Montaigne
 
I quote others only the better to express myself.
-- Michel De Montaigne
 
There is no man so good that if he placed all his actions and thought under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
-- Michel de Montaigne
 
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
-- Michel de Montaigne
 
If falsehood like truth had only one face, we would be in better shape. For we would take as certain the opposite of what the liar said. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.
-- Michel de Montaigne
 
Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
-- Michel De Montaigne
 
I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so.
-- Michel De Montaigne
 
He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying.
-- Michel de Montaigne
 
It is unreasonable ... to oblige a man not to attempt the defense of his own life.
-- Charles de Montesquieu
 
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
-- Charles de Montesquieu
 
Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty. [Fr., Les republiques finissent par le luxe; les monarchies, par la pauvrete.]
-- Charles de Montesquieu
 
In the state of nature...all men are born equal, but they cannot continue in this equality. Society makes them lose it, and they recover it only by the protection of the law.
-- Charles de Montesquieu
 
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
-- Charles de Montesquieu
 
Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.
-- Charles de Montesquieu
 
Few persons enjoy real liberty; we are all slaves to ideas or habits.
-- Louis Charles Alfred de Musset
 
The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.
-- Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre
 
The secret of liberty is to enlighten men, as that of tyranny is to keep them in ignorance.
-- Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre
 
The evil of democracy is not the triumph of quantity, but the triumph of bad quality.
-- Guido De Ruggiero
 
I know of but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
-- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
 
People haven't time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
 
True, it is evil that a single man should crush the herd, but see not there the worse form of slavery, which is when the herd crushes out the man.
-- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
 
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
-- Charles-Louis De Secondat
 
But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.
-- Charles-Louis de Secondat
 
Useless laws weaken necessary laws.
-- Charles-Louis de Secondat
 
In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.
-- Charles-Louis de Secondat
 
What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.
-- Charles-Louis de Secondat
 
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
-- Charles-Louis De Secondat
 
We ought to be very cautious in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty, and may be the origin of a number of petty acts of tyranny if the legislator be not on his guard; for as such an accusation does not bear directly on the overt acts of a citizen, but refers to the idea we entertain of his character.
-- Charles-Louis De Secondat
 
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.
-- Charles-Louis de Secondat
 
Moral indignation is in most cases 2% moral, 48% indignation and 50% envy.
-- Vittorio de Sica
 
It is within the police power of the state to prohibit public use of fighting words that create a danger of breach of the peace, but simply to prohibit public use of fighting words is too broad. Those words may sometimes be used in situations where there is no danger.
-- Ithiel De Sola Pool
 
It [government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
 
I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men's hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
 
A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
 
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
 
Where are we then? The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a taste for law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true?
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
 
Quand donc je refuse d'obéir à une loi injuste, je ne dénie point à la majorité le droit de commander; j'en appelle seulement de la souveraineté du peuple à la souveraineté du genre humain. Il y a des gens qui n'ont pas craint de dire qu'un peuple, dans les objets qui n'intéressaient que lui-même, ne pouvait sortir entièrement des limites de la justice et de la raison, et qu'ainsi on ne devait pas craindre de donner tout pouvoir à la majorité qui le représente. Mais c'est là un langage d'esclave.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
 
The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so, and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
 
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
 
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
 


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