Speaking Freely
Quotes on Rights and Liberty #39
Lord Palmerston • 1784–1865
“There is a passion in the human heart stronger than the desire to be free from injustice and wrong, and that is the desire to inflict injustice and wrong upon others, and men resent more keenly an attempt to prevent them from oppressing other people than they do the oppression from which they themselves suffer.”
Isaiah Berlin • 1909–1997
“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.”
Umberto Eco • 1932—2016
“National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery.”
Coretta Scott King • 1927–2006
“Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.”
Rose Wilder Lane • 1886–1968
“To believe that any action based on an ignorance of fact can possibly succeed, is to abandon the use of reason.”
The White Rose • 1942–1943
“Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be ‘governed’ without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct.”
Oscar Wilde • 1854–1900
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Maya Angelou • 1928—2014
“Equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.”
James Madison • 1751—1836
“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.”
𝐎𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐭 • 1881–1963
“The uneducated and unenterprising, those who prefer the evils they know of to the unknown, those who like to live along quietly and not be worried with ideas or emotions, have always supported the safe counsels of reactionary politics.”
Moorfield Storey • 1845—1929
“Between the principle of freedom, that all men are entitled to equal political rights and the dogma of tyranny, that might makes right, there is no middle ground.”
Lysander Spooner • 1808—1887
“Through all time, so far as history informs us, wherever mankind have attempted to live in peace with each other, both the natural instincts, and the collective wisdom of the human race, have acknowledged and prescribed, as an indispensable condition, obedience to this one only universal obligation: viz., that each should live honestly towards every other.
The ancient maxim makes the sum of a man’s legal duty to his fellow men to be simply this: ‘To live honestly, to hurt no one, to give to every one his due.’
This entire maxim is really expressed in the single words, to live honestly; since to live honestly is to hurt no one, and give to every one his due.”
Justice Robert Jackson • 1892–1954
“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy. One’s right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly may not be submitted to vote; they depend on no elections.”
Henry Hazlitt • 1894–1993
“The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”
Justice Hugo Black • 1886–1971
“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 words meant and meant their prohibitions to be ‘absolutes.’”
Henry David Thoreau • 1817–1862
“There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.”
Frank Schaeffer • 1952 —
“How can anyone who loves our country support the Republicans now? Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan defined the modern conservatism that used to be what the Republican Party I belonged to was about. Today no actual conservative can be a Republican. Reagan would despise today’s wholly negative Republican Party.”
James Madison • 1751–1836
“During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”
Eric Hoffer • 1898—1983
“Some of the worst tyrannies of our day genuinely are ‘vowed’ to the service of mankind, yet can only function by pitting neighbor against neighbor.”
Hubert H. Humphrey • 1911–1978
“The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.”
George Orwell • 1903–1950
“One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.”
Jon Meacham, Newsweek, April 3, 2009
“Judging from the broad shape of American life in the first decade of the 21st century, we value individual freedom and free (or largely free) enterprise, and tend to lean toward libertarianism on issues of personal morality. The foundational documents are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (though there are undeniable connections between them). This way of life is far different from what many overtly conservative Christians would like. But that is the power of the republican system engineered by James Madison at the end of the 18th century: that America would survive in direct relation to its ability to check extremism and preserve maximum personal liberty.”
Heinrich Heine • 1797—1856
“Whoever, by the irresistible force of genius, rises above the common herd is certain to be ostracized by society, which will pursue him with such merciless derision and detraction that at last he will be compelled to retreat into the solitude of his thoughts.”
James Russell Lowell • 1819–1891
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.
𝐂𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐃𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐨𝐰 • 𝟏𝟖𝟓𝟕 — 𝟏𝟗𝟑𝟖
“The rebel who succeeds generally makes it easier for the posterity that follows him; so these descendants are usually contented and smug and soft.”
The desktop used to prepare this page and our other pages is past it’s use-by date with an operating system that is running into lots of problems, especially in opening other sites for research. Your support to fund these columns is critical, visit our page at Patreon to make a $10 pledge. If you wish to pledge another amount per month you can do so at this link — anything starting from $1 and up. All of it helps especially now.
