Famous Quotes & Sayings

James F. Cooper

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

James F. Cooper

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.

James F. Cooper

The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority.

James Anthony Froude

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

Friedrich Schiller

Where there is much freedom there is much error.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self reliant enough to be free.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We, and all others who believe in freedom as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Liberty requires opportunity to make a living--a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives a man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

Luis Bunuel

Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.

Ludwig van Beethoven

To do good whenever one can, to love liberty above all else, never to deny the truth, even though it be before the throne.

Lucan

The remaining liberty of the world was to be destroyed in the place where it stood.

Lucan

All go free when multitudes offend.

Julian Schnabel

You know, painting has given me a lot of freedom, because for some reason, I've been able to paint things, organize things in a way that I see that don't have any buffers or compromises in them.

Orson Scott Card

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.

John Trudell

You go back and you read your Constitution. You read your Declaration of Independence. And you will see that the only people who could decide these freedoms were white males who owned property, and all the rest of us were excluded.

David Keene

This is not a partisan issue. It is an issue of safeguarding the fundamental freedoms of all Americans so that future administrations do not interpret our laws in ways that pose constitutional concerns.

Jack Clark

This is sacred ground today. The price of freedom is truly visible here today.

This is something we'll stop and do for you so that you can have the same freedom that we have.

Thomas Jefferson

Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves.

Thomas Jefferson

In a government bottomed on the will of all, the... liberty of every individual citizen becomes interesting to all.

Thomas Jefferson

The opinions and beliefs of men follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.

Thomas Jefferson

May it be to the world... to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

Thomas Jefferson

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Thomas Jefferson

Men fight for freedom; then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves.

Thomas Jefferson

It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.

Thomas Jefferson

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.

Thomas Jefferson

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

Thomas Jefferson

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.