Famous Quotes & Sayings

H. L. Mencken

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

H. L. Mencken

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

H. L. Mencken

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

H. L. Mencken

the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.

H. L. Mencken

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

H. L. Mencken

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. ... Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

Friedrich Nietzsche

How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Liberal institutions straightway cease being liberal the moment they are soundly established: Once this is attained, no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.

Gerald R. Ford

We must introduce a new balance in the relationship between the individual and the government--a balance that favors greater individual freedom and self-reliance.

Gerald R. Ford

Can a free people restrain crime without sacrificing fundamental liberties and a heritage of compassion?... Let us show that we can temper together those opposite elements of liberty and restraint into one consistent whole. Let us set an example for the world of a law-abiding America glorying in its freedom as well as its respect for law.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Without total freedom, every perception, every objective regard, is twisted. It is only the man who is totally free who can look and understand immediately. Freedom implies really, doesn't it, the total emptying of the mind. Completely to empty the whole content of the mind-that is real freedom. Freedom is not mere revolt from circumstances, which again breeds other circumstances, other environmental influences, which enslave the mind. We are talking about a freedom that comes naturally, easily, unasked for, when the mind is capable of functioning at its highest level.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

I have only one purpose: to make people free, to urge them towards freedom, to help them to break away from all limitations, for that alone will give them eternal happiness, will give them the unconditional realization of Self.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Enlightenment is an accident, but some activities make you accident-prone.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Freedom from something is not freedom.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Here is my secret: I don't mind what happens.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

There are two kinds of freedom: one is the freedom from something, which is a reaction; and the other is not a reaction, it is "being free."

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The guru cannot awaken you; all that he can do is to point out what is.

Marc Warren

I don't like planning, because it robs me of freedom, so I'd like a 24 hours that was full of surprises.

Paul Mooney

I do celebrate anything with freedom in it, you know.

Moira Kelly

I do have the freedom to choose what I want to do and I'll continue to do that.

I'd never had to shoot free throws in a situation like that before. I just went up there and thought about hitting my free throws. I wasn't thinking about anything else.

Peter Thiel

I believe, basically, that individual freedom is very important.

Hubert H. Humphrey

Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.

Hubert H. Humphrey

Freedom is the most contagious virus known to man.

Jamie Dixon

He really set the tone early. He recognized what we wanted to do early. He waited for his shots and he made his free throws.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

It is easier to rule others than to keep from being ruled oneself.

Greg Biffle

If I was a little freer I might have got him.

If I had done my job better of preparing these guys, we would have done better. But (Freedom's) soccer, well, wasn't really soccer. They had to rely on free kicks and throw-ins. And for us to lose to a team that plays that type of soccer is very disappointing.

I don't see any harm in it. . . . We have guys who miss free throws who are really good shooters.