Quote:
To repeat or reproduce the exact words of another.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr (1841-1935)
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968)
The
fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that
it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of
the silliness of the
majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish
than sensible.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
When society sanctions both the unacceptable and unnatural, scorns the fact that there may
be a God whose wrath is kindled by such, or mistakenly thinks that
He’ll accommodate such, trouble and calamity are undoubtedly a
possibility.
The Author
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
Adlai Stevenson (1835-1914)
Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.
John Wooden (1910-2010)
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige
that the warrior does today.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
George Washington (1732-1799)
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Man is not free unless government
is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and
predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty
contracts.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
A civil ruler
dabbling in religion is as reprehensible as a clergyman dabbling in
politics. Both render themselves odious as well as ridiculous.
James Cardinal Gibbons (1834-1921)
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic,
Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or
accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National
Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — no religious
body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general
populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious
liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as
an act against all.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
Tacitus (AD 56-AD117)
When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself;
and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to
support it, so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the
Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.
Benjamin Franklin (stated Oct. 9, 1780)
Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.
Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968)
Once
torture has become acclimatized in a legal system it spreads like an
infectious disease. It saves the labour of investigation. It hardens
and brutalizes those who have become accustomed to use it.
Sir William Holdsworth (1871-1944)
It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.
David Hume (1711-1776)
All
religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty.
All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.
Henry Clay (1777-1852)
Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from
the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of
resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of
governmental power, not the increase of it.
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)
Freedom
is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass
it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for,
protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Freedom is one of the deepest and noblest aspirations of the human spirit.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
Religious and racial persecution is moronic at all times, perhaps the most idiotic of human stupidities.
Harry S. Truman (1945-1953)
To take the sword, gun, or bomb in Christ's name is to repudiate both Christ and his message.
John C. Lennox
Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and
the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep
the church and state forever seperate.
Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)
A people that values it's privileges above its principles soon loses both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully
as when they do it with religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal
(1623-1662)
A
nation of well-informed men, who have been taught to know and prize the
rights that God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region
of ignorance that tyranny begins!
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes. Benjamin Disraeli ( 1804-1881)
For
we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy
that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of
influence - on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead
of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by
night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has
conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a
tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military,
diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political
operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes
are buried not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No
expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
The
governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other
governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the
secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and
can at the last moment upset all the governments’ plans.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
Behind the
ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no
allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
Great
nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly
ambitious individuals who have become so effectively powerful because of
their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national
scenery. Buckminister Fuller (1895-1983)
A
nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot
survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable,
for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves
amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through
all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the
traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his
victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the
baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a
nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the
pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no
longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC-43 BC)
Many
journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George
Orwell called the 'official truth'. They simply cipher and transmit
lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be
so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as
'functionaires', functionaries, not journalists.
John Pilger, Australian journalist
It
is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers
without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths
that surround it.
John Pilger, Australian journalist
There are two histories: official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.
Edward Bernays (1891-1995)
The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
Herbert Agar (1897-1980)
We look forward to the
time when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will
our world know the blessings of peace.
William Gladstone (1809-1898)
Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.
C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Persecution, whenever
it occurs, establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor,
not the truth and worth of his belief.
H.M.Kallen
A religion which requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil's propagation.
Hosea Ballou (1771-1852)
Truth is not determined by majority vote.
Doug Gwyn
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
Persecution is disobeying the most solemn injunction of Christianity, under the sham plea of upholding it.
Paul Chatfield
An injustice committed against anyone is a threat to everyone.
Montesquieu (1689-1755)
Official truths are often powerful illusions.
John Pilger, Journalist
The
Press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of the government
and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can
effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the
responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the
government from deceiving the people.
Justice Hugo L. Black
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
There are
only two things in which the false professors of all religions have
agreed -- to persecute all other sects and to plunder their own.
Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)
I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause that will some day lose.
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Eric Arthur Blair, pen name George Orwell (1903-1950)
Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private.
Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973)
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
Francois Voltaire (1694-1778)
One of the things
that bothers me most is the growing belief in the country that security
is more important than freedom. It ain't.
Lyn Nofziger (1924-2006)
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands
in times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968)
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
Emiliano Zappata (1879-1919)
Wherever you see persecution, there is more than a probability that truth lies on the persecuted side.
Hugh Latimer (1487-1555)
If
we condone torture, we yield the moral high ground to our enemies and
encourage anyone who hates us to stoop to using that subhuman level
against us. We reap whatever we sow.
Rick Warren
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968)
The coward
wretch whose hand and heart can bear to torture aught below, Is ever
first to quail and start from the slightest pain or equal foe.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
Truth never
envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time
enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
God grants liberty only to those who love it and are always ready to guard and defend it.
Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
Benjamin Cardozo (1870-1938)
No man survives
when freedom fails, The best men rot in filthy jails, And those who cry
'appease, appease' Are hanged by those they tried to please.
Hiram Mann
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge
of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that
a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say “This is
my country.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution.
John Milton (1608-1674)
The condition upon which God has given liberty to man is eternal
vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the
consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
John Philpot Curran (1750-1817).
An honest man, like true religion, appeals to the understanding, or
modestly confides in the internal evidence of his conscience. The
imposter employs force instead of argument, imposes silence where he
cannot convince, and propagates his character by the sword.
The Letters Of Junius (1769-1771)
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Right is its own defense.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.
Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780)
Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two
outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity.
Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Francois Voltaire (1694-1778)
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794-1865)
Those who believe absurdities end up committing atrocities.
Francois Voltaire (1694-1778)
To announce truths is an infallible receipt for being persecuted.
Francois Voltaire (1694-1778)
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
Elie Wiesel
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856-1941)
The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945)
Every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being
accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be
protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own
conscience.
George Washington (stated May 1789)
Most of the greatest
evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling
quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Religion is essentially distinct from civil Government, and exempt
from its cognizance; ...a connection between them is injurious to both.
James Madison (stated March 19, 1823)
According
to Gestapo records…they had little need to engage in direct spying on
the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do
their spying for them.
Kort E. Patterson
Do not expect justice where might is right.
Plato (428 B.C. - 347 B.C.)
It
is iniquitous, unjust, and most impolitic to persecute for religion's
sake. It is against natural religion, revealed religion, and sound
policy.
William Murray (1705-1793)
It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every
man should worship according to his own convictions... It is assuredly
no part of religion to compel religion—to which free-will and not force
should lead us.
Tertullian (c. 160 - c. 200 AD)
Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Condemn no man for not thinking as you think: Let every one enjoy
the full and free liberty of thinking for himself: Let every man use
his own judgment, since every man must give an account of himself to
God. Abhor every approach, in any kind or degree, to the spirit of
persecution. If you cannot reason or persuade a man into truth, never
attempt to force him into it. If love will not compel him to come in,
leave him to God, the Judge of all.
John Wesley (stated 1872)
Almighty God hath created the mind free; ...all attempts to
influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil
incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness,
and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion,
who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by
coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do.
Thomas Jefferson (stated 1786)
It has become a
settled principle that nothing which is good and true can be destroyed
by persecution, but that the effect ultimately is to establish more
firmly, and to spread more widely, that which it was designed to
overthrow. It has long since passed into a proverb that "the blood of
the martyrs is the seed of the church."
Albert Barnes (1798-1870)
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its
instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual
beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder
or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) — The Olive Tree
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official...
Theodore Roosevelt
(1858-1919)
If God himself was not willing to use coercion to force man to
accept certain religious views, man, uninspired and liable to error,
ought not to use the means that Jehovah would not employ.
W.J.Bryan, in introduction to “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson.”
To discriminate against a thoroughly upright citizen because he
belongs to some particular church, or because, like Abraham Lincoln, he
has not avowed his allegiance to any church, is an outrage against the
liberty of conscience, which is one of the foundations of American life.
Roosevelt’s letter on religious liberty.
The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of the wise man is in his heart.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Don't pray that God's on our side, pray that we're on His side.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.
Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
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.
James Madison (1751-1836)
You can have such an open mind that it is too porous to hold a conviction.
George Crane (1901-1995)
Without an unfettered
press, without liberty of speech, all the outward forms and structures
of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If
the press is not free; if speech is not independant and untrammeled; if
the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no
difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject
and not a citizen.
William E. Borah (1865-1940)
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
The open-minded see the truth in different things: the narrow-minded see only the differences.
Author unknown
The
very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are
as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to
secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the
dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far
outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965)
The
notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve
the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these
institutions must be wholly free -- which is to say that their function
is to serve as checks upon the state.
Alan Barth (1906-1979)
Thought
that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often
mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily
dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to
major delusions.
Alan Barth (1906-1979)
If
cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a
matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to
government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The
Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by
the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free
of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America -- even
those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this
exception the whole Constitution crumbles.
Alberto J. Mora, former Navy General Counsel
Wisdom is found only in truth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Sometimes standing up for something that is right means
standing alone.
Anonymous
Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Liberty may make mistakes but tyranny is the death of a nation.
Giacomo Matteotti (1885-1924)
The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
Charles-Louis De Secondat (1689-1755)
True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.
Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
In
any field, the Establishment is seldom in pursuit of the truth, because
it is composed of those who sincerely believe that they are already in
possession of it.
E. T. Jaynes (1922-1998)
Biographical
history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of
boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders,
compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals -- the flotsam and jetsam of
historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great
scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned,
if at all.
Martin Gardner (1914-2010)
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
The
strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its
spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market
economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement
of human life. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it
will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government
structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core
cannot stand.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
Woe
to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force.
This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the
sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
Force always attracts men of low morality.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
If
I am to be hedged in on every side, to be fretted by the perpetual
presence of arbitrary will, to be denied the exercise of my powers, it
matters nothing to me whether the chain is laid on me by one or many,
by king or people. A despot is not more tolerable for his many heads.
William E. Channing (1780-1842)
The
deliberate torture of one human being by another is a sin against our
Creator, in whose image we all have been created. This practice should
not be condoned or allowed by any government. It must be condemned by
all people of faith, wherever it exists, without exception.
Archbishop Demetrios, Primate, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
There
hasn't been peace on earth because people cant seem to figure out that
the real enemy is the people manipulating world events from behind the
scenes for their own selfish interests.
James Dye
The use of torture is dishonourable. It corrupts and degrades the state which uses it and the legal system which accepts it.
Leonard Hoffmann
Today
we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would
intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic
freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we
must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.
President Barack Obama
At
the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and
other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains
amazingly persistent.
Joseph Sobran (1946-2010)
People don't start wars, governments do.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society.
Andrei Sakharow (1921-1989)
Till the infallibility of human judgment shall have been proved to me, I shall demand the abolition of the death penalty.
Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834)
Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another out but similars that breed their kind.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
I
was in favour of the death penalty, and disposed to regard
abolitionists as people whose hearts were bigger than their heads. Four
years of close study of the subject gradually dispelled that feeling.
In the end I became convinced that the abolitionists were right in
their conclusions...and that far from the sentimental approach leading
into their camp and the rational one into that of the supporters, it
was the other way about.
Sir Ernest Gowers (1880-1966)
We are on the precipice of being so ignorant that our democracy is threatened.
Walter Cronkite ( 1916-2009)
To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice.
Desmond Tutu
Government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us, blinds us to its great power to harm us.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military
defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death.
Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968)
Unless bureaucracy is constantly resisted, it breaks down representative government and overwhelms democracy.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902)
Government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)
I
hereby certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of
force as a means of achieving political or social goals.
The Libertarian Party of the United States
How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
The
purpose of freedom of speech -- especially in a properly protected
political debate -- is to allow a verbal outlet in the marketplace of
ideas, and to thereby avoid conflict and violence.
Becky Hawkins
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been
tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
Truth is not what I believe. Truth is not even what I know.
Truth is fact. I may not believe it. I may not know it. That does not change it.
It is there nevertheless, waiting to be discovered and believed.
Truth does not depend on the unsettled and changing opinions of men.
It was truth before it was believed. It will remain truth, whether it is believed or not.
Reason does not originate or create it. It merely discovers it.
Consequently, reason is not a source. Truth goes back beyond reason.
Others would have us believe that the Church is the source or authority,
particularly in matters of theology. They are WRONG!
The Church is the product of truth. It does not originate it.
It came into being by accepting divine revelations. It is not the source of that revelation.
Truth goes beyond the Church, it is antecedent to it.
Carlyle B. Haynes (1882-1958)
