 Quotations on this page deal with the topics of Freedom and Justice.
***** "There is a reason terrorists hate us, and it's not our religion or our surplus of freedoms. It is that we continually bomb and economically rape countries poorer than us -- bully them into submission. And, if that doesn't work, it's obviously 'cause we haven't bombed them enough, so we bomb them some more." -fruity1983 (on the web) ***** "Revenge feels right only to those directly involved. Justice feels right even to outsiders." -Marilyn Vos Savant ***** "Those who try to stifle the vibrancy of our democracy and shield policies from scrutiny behind a false cloak of patriotism miss the real value of what our troops defend and how we best defend our troops. We will ask questions and we will defend our democracy." -US Senator John F. Kerry ***** "Restriction on 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." -Thurgood Marshall, former Supreme Court Justice ***** "Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly." -Isaac Asimov ***** "I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my lifetime." -Albert Einstein ***** "If you tremble indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine." -Ernesto "Che" Guevara ***** "There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death. We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all of us." -Ernesto "Che" Guevara ***** "Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted." -Ernesto "Che" Guevara ***** "Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth." -George Washington ***** "Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?" -Jean-Baptiste Say ***** "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute." -Rebecca West ***** "As much as we wish to be safe forever from [terrorism], we simply cannot protect freedom by forsaking freedom." -Paul McMasters ***** "We have to fight the terrorists as if there were no rules and preserve our open society as if there were no terrorists." -Thomas Friedman ***** "Because of what appears to be a lawful command on the surface, many Citizens, because of respect for the law, are cunningly coerced into waiving their rights due to ignorance." -Supreme Court opinion, U.S. v. Minker ***** "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue." -Barry Goldwater Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." -Winston Churchill ***** "And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms." -Samuel Adams ***** "I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill." -Mahatma Gandhi ***** "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." -Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems ***** "The revolution ... is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters." -Fidel Castro ***** "I expect nothing. I fear no one. I am free." -Nikos Kazantzakis ***** "Technology now allows employers to cross the line from monitoring the work to monitoring the worker." -Cindia Cameron ***** "[Constitutional guarantees in the 4th amendment] apply to all invasions on the part of government and its employees of the sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life. It is not the breaking of his doors, and the rummaging in his drawers, that constitutes the essence of the offense; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty and private property." -Justice Joseph Bradley ***** "The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable." -U.S. Privacy Protection Study Commission, 1977 ***** "Money is coined liberty." -Fyodor Dostoevsky ***** "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson ***** "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty." -John F. Kennedy ***** "America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." -Alexis de Tocqueville ***** "Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" -Patrick Henry ***** "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." -John Stuart Mill ***** "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." -John Stuart Mill Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains." -Jean-Jacques Rousseau ***** "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." -Voltaire ***** "To none will we sell, to none deny or delay, right or justice." -The Magna Carta ***** "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 ***** "The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice." -John Rawls ***** "The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance." -John Rawls ***** "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 inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human." -Isaiah Berlin ***** "Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does." -Jean-Paul Sartre ***** "So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy." -Roger Baldwin ***** "We must remember that a right lost to one is lost to all." -William Reece Smith, Jr. ***** "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." -Martin Luther King, Jr. ***** "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." -Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis ***** "Man is free at the moment he wishes to be." -Voltaire ***** "When they took the fourth amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent. When they took the second amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun. Now they've come for the first amendment, and I can't say anything at all." -Tim Freeman ***** "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." -John F. Kennedy ***** "Conscience is the chamber of justice." -Origen Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt." -Bergen Evans ***** "Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority--literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political." -Ignazio Silone ***** "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -Thomas Jefferson ***** "Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure." -Bertrand Russell ***** "Most people want security in this world, not liberty." -H. L. Mencken ***** "The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." -Rudyard Kipling ***** "Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free." -Ralph Waldo Emerson ***** "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." -George Bernard Shaw ***** "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." -Oliver Wendell Holmes ***** "I'm the one that has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to." -Jimi Hendrix ***** "Laws are only words words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool." -John J. Miller ***** "A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular." -Adlai Stevenson ***** "You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." -Lyndon Johnson ***** "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." -Thomas Jefferson ***** "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 evilminded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -Justice Louis D. Brandeis ***** "Respect for individual rights is the essential precondition for a free and prosperous world, ... and that only through freedom can peace and prosperity be realized." -Preamble to the Libertarian Platform Click Here to Visit our Sponsor ***** "The man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's." -Aristotle ***** "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too." -Voltaire ***** "The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right." -William Safire ***** "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be." -William Hazlitt 68 quotes in this category Return to The Quotation Station main page. |