Herbert Spencer
English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and political theorist, 1820 – 1903
"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
C.S. Lewis
British novelist, poet, academic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer. 1898 – 1963
“Of all tyrannies. a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Lord Acton
(John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton)
English historian, philosopher, and politician. 1834 – 1902
“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.”
Samual Adams
American statesman, early champion of independence, an architect of the Constitution. 1722 – 1803
“It does not take a majority to prevail … but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men.”
Anonymous
“Conspiracy theorist: Someone who questions the statements of known liars.”
Frédéric Bastiat
French economist, author, and member of the National Assembly. 1801 – 1850
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
“Government is the great fiction through which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else.”
“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.”
Richard B. Boddie
Activist, lawyer; adjunct professor of law; first black banker in Rochester, NY; former Chairman Libertarian Party, Orange County, California.
“With Republicans in power, man exploits man. With Democrats, just the opposite.”
Edmund Burke
British-Irish statesman, author, orator, and philosopher, Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. 1729 – 1797
“Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.”
“When bad men combine, the good must associate, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptable struggle.”
“The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion.”
Michael Chrichton
American best-selling author, physician, producer, director, and screenwriter
1942 – 2008
“The greatest challenges facing mankind are distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.”
Clarence Darrow
American lawyer and advocate
of civil liberties. 1857 – 1938
“You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.”
Frederick Douglas
Born a slave, became an American abolitionist, social reformer, orator, and writer. 1817 – 1895
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Albert Einstein
Creator of the theory of relativity,
winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. 1879 – 1955
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Epictetus
Phrygian slave and Stoic philosopher.
AD 55 – 135
“No man is free who is not a master of himself.”
G. Edward Griffin
Author, Publisher of Need to Know,
Founder of Freedom Force International
“The power to govern is a magnet for the predator class. That is why it is common for governments to evolve into crime syndicates.”
“It is the nature of governments to expand their power. Since power leads to corruption, governments eventually become crime syndicates.”
“Politics is the science of making people do what they do not want to do, making them pay for it, making them also pay your salary and expenses, and making them think it is for their own good.”
“If freedom is to prevail, governments must be replaced by protectorates whose function is, not to govern their citizens, but to protect them.”
“Being informed is not enough. It makes no difference how much you know if you fail to act.”
“Those who are not interested in politics will be forever ruled by those who are”
“The rulers of America do not write letters to their Congressmen. They write checks to their Congressmen.”
“Our mission is, not to recruit the masses, but to be worthy of leading them.”
Patrick Henry
American attorney, planter, and politician noted for his oratory on behalf of independence from Great Britain.
1736 – 1799
“Nothing will preserve [liberty] but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.”
“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”
Victor Hugo
French poet, novelist, and artist.
1802 – 1885
“Greater than the force of mighty armies is the power of an idea whose time has come.”
Thomas Jefferson
Principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, Third President of The United States 1743 – 1826
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free … it expects what never was and never will be.”
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
“If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.”
"It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes; a principle which, if acted on, would save one-half of the wars of the world."
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Chilean film and theatre director, playwright, composer, and musician.
“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”
Abraham Lincoln
16th President of the United States
1809–1865
“All the armies of Europe and Asia… could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
“You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended on to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”
James Madison
4th President of the United States
1751 – 1836
“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention. … and have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.”
George Mason
Virginia planter, politician, and a delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention. 1725 – 1792
“I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.”
Edward R. Murrow
American radio and TV journalist.
1908 – 1965
“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
George Orwell
English essayist, novelist, satirist.
1903 – 1950
“In a time of universal deceit,
telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Thomas Paine
English-American political activist and revolutionary journalist. He authored the two most influential pamphlets of the American Revolution. 1737 – 1809
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”
Wendell Phillips
American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and lawyer. 1814 – 1884
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
I cent. A.D. Marble portrait of Plato. "Portraits. The Many Faces of Power" Exhibition at the Capitoline museums, Rome. Italy. 10/3/2011
Plato
Greek philosopher, founder of the Academy in Athens, 428– 348 BC
“A tyrant … is always stirring up some war or other in order that the people may require a leader.”
“The people have always some champion who they set over them and nurse into greatness…. This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs. When he first appears, he is a protector.”
Will Rogers
American cowboy, humorist, newspaper columnest, actor. 1879 – 1935
“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when a baby gets hold of a hammer.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
German philosopher, 1788 – 1860
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
Tacitus
Roman Senator, historian, and orator.
“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”
Margaret Thatcher
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990.
“The problem with socialism is that, eventually, you run out of other people’s money.”
Theodore Roosevelt
26th President of the United States
1858 – 1919
“The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.”
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
"When I say I believe in a square deal, I do not mean ... to give every man the best hand. If the cards do not come to any man or, if they do come and he has not the power to play them, that is his affair. All I mean is that there shall be no crookedness in the dealing."
"Any man who tries to incite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do so in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainty that class's own worst enemy."
"The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything."
Attributed to Joseph Stalin
dictator of the Soviet Union from mid 1920s until his death in 1953
“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.”
Mark Twain
American author and humorist
1835 – 1902
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”
George Washington
Military leader of the American Revolution and First President of the United States. 1732 – 1799
“Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all … [but] have with them as little political connection as possible.”
“Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”
Daniel Webster
US Senator, lawyer, orator
1782 – 1852
“The Constitution was made to guard the people against the danger of good intentions.”
“There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”
Woodrow Wilson
28th President of the United States
1856 – 1924
“Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”
“All over the Union, people are coming to feel that they have no control over the course of affairs…. ‘We vote; we are offered the platform we want; we elect the men who stand on that platform; and we get absolutely nothing.’ So they begin to ask: ‘What is the use of voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction.’ “
“Our government has been for the past few years under the control of heads of great allied corporations with special interests. It has not controlled these interests and assigned them a proper place in the whole system of business; it has submitted itself to their control. As a result, there have grown up vicious systems and schemes of governmental favoritism.”
“Nothing could be a greater departure from original Americanism, from faith in the ability of a confident, resourceful, and independent people, than the discouraging doctrine that somebody has got to provide prosperity for the rest of us. And yet that is exactly the doctrine on which the government of the United States has been conducted lately.”
“We know that something intervenes between the people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at Washington. It is not the people who have been ruling there of late.”
“The wealth of the country has, in recent years, come from … sources which have built up monopoly. Its point of view is … of those men who do not wish that the people should determine their own affairs because they do not believe that the people’s judgment is sound. They want to be commissioned to take care of the United States and of the people of the United States because they believe that they, better than anybody else, understand the interests of the United States.”