Quotes about basic liberty and such,
relevant to Mandatory Public School Uniforms
- Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin
of course, this one quote alone should be sufficient, but
just in case it isn't, here are a few more:
- The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- Liberty is the only thing you can't have unless you give it to others.
--William Allen White
- Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
--Thomas Jefferson
- He is most free from danger, who, even when safe, is on his guard.
--Publilius Syrus
- Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect
liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
--Louis D. Brandeis
- "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent
injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."
--~ Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate
- The greatest Glory of a free-born People, is to transmit that
Freedom to their Children.
--William Havard
- Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
--Mahatma Gandhi
- Freedom rings where opinions clash.
--Adlai E. Stevenson
- Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means
nothing more than the freedom to stagnate.
--Adlai E. Stevenson
- I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much
liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.
--Thomas Jefferson
- "Suffocation of human freedom among a once free people...is more far-reaching
in its implications and its effects on their future than the destruction of
their homes, industrial centers, and transportation facilities. Out of
rubble heaps, willing hands can rebuild a better city; but out of freedom lost
can stem only generations of hate and bitter struggle and brutal oppression."
-
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from
ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and
undernourishment.
--~ Robert Maynard Hutchins
- Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
--George Bernard Shaw
- I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
--H. L. Mencken
- Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
--Jean Jacques Rousseau
- They that are on their guard and appear ready to receive their
adversaries, are in much less danger of being attacked than the supine,
secure and negligent.
--Benjamin Franklin
- There is a significant Latin proverb; to wit: Who will guard the guards?
--Josh Billings
- Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.
--Cicero
- What light is to the eyes--what air is to the lungs--what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man.
--Robert Green Ingersoll
- Where liberty is, there is my country.
--Benjamin Franklin
- I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty.
--Woodrow Wilson
- Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.
--Earl Warren
- Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
--Henry Brooks Adams
- The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.
--Thomas Jefferson
- Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.
--Harry Emerson Fosdick
- Conform and be dull
--J. Frank Doble
- It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an
incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
--Albert Einstein
- We are discreet sheep, we wait to see how the drove is going,
and the go with the drove.
--Mark Twain
- "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupidity."
--Hanlon's Razor
- "Beware all enterprises that require new clothes."
--~ Henry David Thoreau
- "Nothing is ever a complete failure; it can always serve as a bad
example."
--Carlson's Consolation
-
Education that consists in learning things and not the meaning of them
is feeding upon the husks and not the corn.
--Mark Twain
-
"If fifty million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish
thing."
--Anatole France
-
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education
--Mark Twain
-
It's more fun to arrive at a conclusion than to justify it.
-- Malcolm S. Forbes
-
Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.
--Mark Twain
- The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in
higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
--Nietzsche
- America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity,
lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief, it has
advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.
--Louis D. Brandeis
- Individuality is either the mark of genius or the reverse.
Mediocrity finds safety in standardization.
-- Frederick E. Crane
- Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the
exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and
these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows,
or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of
those whom they oppress.
-- Frederick Douglass, civil rights activist, 1857
- Political corruption begins with every voter who votes his pocketbook
instead of for what's good for the country. There is little difference
between the selling of his vote by an elected official and the selling
of his vote by a voter, to whatever candidate promises him some benefit.
-- Jon Roland, campaign speech for Congress, 1974
(or votes to restrict liberty because it's cheaper and/or easier!)
- It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself,
to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by
change of circumstances, become his own.
--Thomas Jefferson
- When Hitler came for the Jews... I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not
concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic,
and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and
the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not
concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was
nobody left to be concerned.
-- Pastor Martin Niemoller, Congressional Record,
October 14, 1968, vol. 114, p. 31636.
- So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who
wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will
devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise,
to put shackles upon sleeping men.
-- Voltarine de Cleyre
- Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of "emergency".
It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist
sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving
to get on horseback. And "emergency" became the justification of the
subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the
greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.
-- Herbert Hoover.
- There are no permanent changes because change itself is permanent. It behooves the industrialist to research and the investor to be vigilant.
--Ralph L. Woods
- The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
--Eric Hoffer
- Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we
shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,
oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- But we know that freedom cannot be served by the devices of the
tyrant. As it is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated
into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored
into existence. And any who act as if freedom's defenses are to
found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien
to America.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower
- We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make
room upon the earth for honest men to live in.
--Thomas Paine
- No man is free who is not a master of himself.
--Epictetus
- If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is
that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in
politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force
citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
--Robert H. Jackson
- When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
--Charles Evans Hughes, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1925
- Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.
--Abraham Lincoln
- I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower
- There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion
with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against
encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as
protection against political despotism.
--John Stuart Mill
- In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been
granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do
not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it.
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
- To be what no one ever was,
To be what everyone has been:
Freedom is the mean of those
Extremes that fence all effort in.
--Mark Van Doren
- Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men,
undergo the fatigues of supporting it.
--Thomas Paine
- The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid
it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of
surrender, or submission.
--John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.
--Douglas MacArthur
- A nation which makes the final sacrifice for life and freedom does not get beaten.
--Kemal Atatürk
- "All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments
by public opinion; and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their
prosperity depends"
--J.R.Lowell
- "The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own
good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of
theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it."
--J.S.Mill
- "Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of person
under the protection of the habeus corpus, these are principles that have
guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation"
--~Jefferson
- "Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human
happiness."
--~Bulwer
- Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
--Will Rogers
- Liberty consists in wholesome restraint.
--Daniel Webster
- "All good government must begin in the home. It is useless to make
good laws for bad people. Public sentiment is more than law."
--~ H.R.Haweis
- "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to
protect liberty when government's puposes are beneficent.
Men born to freedom are naturally alert to reject 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."
--~ late Chief Justice Brandeis
(via McCuistion)
- "Virtue is to be feared more than vice because its excesses
are not subject to the regulation of conscience."
--~ Albert Nock
(via McCuistion)
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