Famous Quotes & Sayings

H. L. Mencken

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.

H. L. Mencken

Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

H. L. Mencken

I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.

H. L. Mencken

Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate...Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.

H. L. Mencken

I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.

H. L. Mencken

The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.

H. L. Mencken

What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.

H. L. Mencken

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

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.

Michael Madsen

Well, one thing for sure, I won't be remembered for 'Free Willy.' Or maybe I will.

Ralph Nader

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

Rajneesh

There is no other revolution except consciousness. It cuts the desires from the very roots and it brings freedom to you.

Rajneesh

Create inner freedom through witnessing. Sannyas is only for the inner freedom. And live out of inner freedom.

Sheena Iyengar

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. —Archibald MacLeish

George W. Bush

Freedom is the direction of history, because freedom is the permanent hope of humanity.

George W. Bush

The greatest power of freedom is to overcome hatred and violence, and turn the creative gifts of men and women to the pursuits of peace.

George W. Bush

Not far from here where we gather today is a symbol of freedom familiar to all Americans - the Liberty Bell. When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public, the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, and a witness said: "It rang as if it meant something."

George W. Bush

We can't impose freedom, but we can eliminate roadblocks to freedom, and to allow free societies to develop.

George W. Bush

Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat.

George W. Bush

We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and Freedom will prevail.

George W. Bush

You can't put democracy and freedom back into a box.

George Steiner

The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.

George Soros

I chose America as my home because I value freedom and democracy, civil liberties and an open society.

George Orwell

Freedom is the right to tell others what they don't want to hear.

George Orwell

To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.

George Orwell

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.