Click on image
The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three-headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three-headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes: fools and hypocrites.
~ in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than no to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.
~ in a letter to Abigail Adams, 1787)
I hold it, that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
~ in a letter to James Madison after Shay’s rebellion
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is their natural manure.
~ in a letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787
No man can bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
~ in a letter to Rutledge, 1795
I have said and always will say, that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands.
~ Quoted by A.W. Pink in What Follows from Divine Inspiration
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he then be trusted with the government of others.
To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever. (in reference to slavery)
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?
As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.
I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
No man can bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it. ( in a letter to Rutledge, 1795)
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves.
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.
Be polite to all, but intimate with few.
Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.
The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.
Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.
I find that he is happiest of whom the world says least, good or bad.
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.
It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war; but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.
War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government.
I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
Determine never to be idle. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.
__________
RELATED
Abraham Lincoln’s Love Of Reading
The Eschatology of Jonathan Edwards
__________
Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.
We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.
__________
RELATED CONTENT
__________
A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the unsolved ones.
~ September 30, 1859 – Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society
All the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man’s welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it.
~ September 7, 1864 – Reply to Loyal Colored People of Baltimore upon Presentation of a Bible
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, — “I see no probability of the British invading us”; but he will say to you, “Be silent: I see it, if you don’t.” To provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.
~ Letter, while US Congressman, to his friend and law-partner William H. Herndon, opposing the Mexican-American War, 15 February 1848
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.
~ Letter to Isham Reavis, 5 November 1855
As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be take pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].
~ Letter to longtime friend and slave-holder Joshua F. Speed, 24 August 1855
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.
~ The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume II, (August 1, 1858), p. 532.
I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. … And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
~ Fourth Lincoln-Douglas Debate, 18 September 1858
I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.
~ Letter to Allen N. Ford, 11 August 1846, quoted in Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, by Roy Prentice Basler
I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.
~ Fourth Lincoln-Douglas Debate, 18 September 1858
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
~ From the first debate with Stephen Douglas in the Lincon-Douglas debates of the 1858 campaign for the US Senate, at Ottawa, Illinois, 21 August 1858, and later repeated in his first Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861
I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer who remarked to a companion once that ‘it was not best to swap horses while crossing streams’.
~ The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume VII, “Reply to Delegation from the National Union League” (June 9, 1864), p. 384.
I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason; I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.
~ Letter to Mrs. Orville H. Browning, 1 April 1838
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!
~ The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, “Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin” (September 30, 1859), pp. 481-482.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.
~ The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume V, “Letter to Horace Greeley” (August 22, 1862), p. 388.
On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been. When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that “all men are created equal” a self evident truth; but now when we have grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim “a self evident lie.
~ August 15, 1855 – Letter to George Robertson
The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships.
~ Letter to Joseph Gillespie, 13 July 1849
The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.
~ Speech in the House of Representatives, 20 June 1848
The way for a young man to rise, is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that any body wishes to hinder him.
~ Letter to William H Herndon, 10 July 1848
There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.
~ Herndon’s Life of Lincoln by William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik (New York, Da Capo Press, 1983), p. 354.
These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.
~ Speech to Illinois legislature, January 1837
Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
~ Letter to Henry L Pierce, 6 April 1859
Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in.
~ Communication to the people of Sangamo County, 9 March 1832)
What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?
~ Lincoln’s Cooper Institute Address, February 27, 1860.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
~ from his Second Inaugural Address
With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.
~ From the first debate with Stephen Douglas Ottawa, Illinois, 21 August 1858
A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.
A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.
All my life I have tried to pluck a thistle and plant a flower wherever the flower would grow in thought and mind.
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
And in the end it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
Avoid popularity if you would have peace.
Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.
Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.
Don’t worry when you are not recognized, but strive to be worthy of recognition.
Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
I care not much for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Knavery and flattery are blood relations.
Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.
Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.
Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.
No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.
Republicans are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.
Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
The fiery trials through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.
The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.
Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.
When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.
When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.
__________
Click on image
__________
RELATED POSTS
- Abraham Lincoln’s Love of Reading
- Religious Affiliation of U.S. Presidents
- Search For A Great President
- Leadership – Select Quotes
I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.
~ Robert Frost
__________
RELATED CONTENT
__________
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
Monotony is the law of nature. Look at the monotonous manner in which the sun rises. The monotony of necessary occupation is exhilarating and life giving.
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
We must become the change we wish to see in the world.
__________
RELATED
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
~ James Baldwin
Freedom is that instant between when someone tells you to do something and when you decide how to respond.
~ Jeffrey Borenstein
The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.
~ Leonid Brezhnev
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
I preach deliverance to others, I tell them there is freedom, while I hear my own chains clang.
~ John Bunyan
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
~ Edmund Burke
The patriot’s blood is the seed of Freedom’s tree.
~ Thomas Campbell
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
~ Albert Camus
There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One is roots; the other, wings.
~ Hodding Carter
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
A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you.
~ Ramsey Clark
Freedom has a thousand charms to show,
That slaves, howe’er contented, never know.
~ William Cowper
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 Darrow
Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.
~ Moshe Dayan
History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.
~ Charles de Gaulle
The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity.
~ John Dewey
To begin with unlimited freedom is to end with unlimited despotism.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Devils
Who would be free themselves must strike the blow. Better even to die free than to live slaves.
~ Frederick Douglass
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.
~ Frederick Douglass
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
~ Frederick Douglass, in an 1883 Civil Rights Mass Meeting speech in Washington, D.C.
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
~ William O. Douglas
As far as your self-control goes, as far goes your freedom.
~ Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
~ Albert Einstein
We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed – else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “Boston” Stanza 15
If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of philosophy.
~ Epictetus
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
~ Epictetus
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
~ William Faulkner
Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom.
~ Marilyn Ferguson
We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.
~ Felix Frankfurter
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
~ Viktor Frankl
Freedom lies in being bold.
~ Robert Frost
You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.
~ Robert Frost
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
~ Mahatma Gandhi
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.
~ Lillian Hellman
The fact, in short, is that freedom, to be meaningful in an organized society must consist of an amalgam of hierarchy of freedoms and restraints.
~ Samuel Hendel
We feel free when we escape – even if it be but from the frying pan into the fire.
~ Eric Hoffer
It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.
~ Molly Ivins
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
~ Thomas Jefferson
No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.
~ Thomas Jefferson
A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned — this is the sum of good government.
~ Thomas Jefferson
I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master.
~ Thomas Jefferson
I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Freedom is like taking a bath — you have to keep doing it every day!
~ Florynce Kennedy
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
~ John F. Kennedy
The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.
~ John F. Kennedy
People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have. For example, the freedom of thought. Instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
~ Søren Kierkegaard
There are two freedoms, the false one where one is free to do what he likes, and the true where a man is free to do what he ought.
~ Charles Kingsley
Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm.
~ Russell Kirk, in Redeeming the Time (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), page 33
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
~ Abraham Lincoln
Him that I love, I wish to be free — even from me.
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort which it brings.
~ Walter Lippmann, in A Preface to Morals
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.
~ Rosa Luxemburg
Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
~ Thomas Macaulay
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
~ James Madison, in a speech to the Virginia Convention in 1788
We are free, truly free, when we don’t need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths.
~ Ricardo Flores Magon, in a speech on May 31, 1914
There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life — happiness, freedom, and peace of mind — are always attained by giving them to someone else.
~ Peyton Conway March
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
~ Somerset Maugham
We have to call it “freedom”: who’d want to die for “a lesser tyranny”?
~ Mignon McLaughlin, in The Neurotic’s Notebook
Freedom means choosing your burden.
~ Hephzibah Menuhin
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right… The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
~ John Stuart Mill
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them — and then, the opportunity to choose.
~ C. Wright Mills
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
~ Edward R. Murrow
Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with.
~ Eleanor Holmes Norton
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
~ Thomas Paine
If a man does only what is required of him, he is a slave.
If a man does more than is required of him, he is a free man.
~ Chinese Proverb
In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
~ George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman, “Maxims: Liberty and Equality,”
If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
~ Carl Shurz
How can you call a man free when his pleasures rule over him.
~ Socrates
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
~ Adlai Stevenson, from a speech in Detroit, 1952
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
~ Henry David Thoreau
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have these three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither.
~ Mark Twain
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.
~ Voltaire
The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
~ Virginia Woolf
To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.
~ Virginia Woolf
No nation ancient or modern ever lost the liberty of freely speaking, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves.
~ John P. Zenger
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is their natural manure.
~ Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Col. William S. Smith, 1787
The tree of liberty will grow only when watered with the blood of tyrants.
~ Barere, in 1792
The patriot’s blood is the seed of Freedom’s tree.
~ Thomas Campbell
__________
Only the educated are free.
~ in Discourses
To accuse others for one’s own misfortune is a sign of want of education; to accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun; to accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.
~ in The Encheiridion
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
~ in Discourses
Keep before your eyes from day to day death and exile and all things that seem terrible, but death most of all, and then you will never set your thoughts on what is low and will never desire anything beyond measure.
~ in The Encheiridion
Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.
~ Epictetus, in Discourses
If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.
No great thing is created suddenly.
__________
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
__________
Rabbi Sherwin Wine:
There are two visions of America. One precedes our founding fathers and finds its roots in the harshness of our puritan past. It is very suspicious of freedom, uncomfortable with diversity, hostile to science, unfriendly to reason, contemptuous of personal autonomy. It sees America as a religious nation. It views patriotism as allegiance to God. It secretly adores coercion and conformity. Despite our constitution, despite the legacy of the Enlightenment, it appeals to millions of Americans and threatens our freedom.
The other vision finds its roots in the spirit of our founding revolution and in the leaders of this nation who embraced the age of reason. It loves freedom, encourages diversity, embraces science and affirms the dignity and rights of every individual. It sees America as a moral nation, neither completely religious nor completely secular. It defines patriotism as love of country and of the people who make it strong. It defends all citizens against unjust coercion and irrational conformity.
This second vision is our vision. It is the vision of a free society. We must be bold enough to proclaim it and strong enough to defend it against all its enemies.
