Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

We have used up all our inherited freedom, like the young bird the albumen in the egg. It is not an era of repose. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.

Henry David Thoreau

The question is whether you can bear freedom. At present the vast majority of men, whether white or black, require the discipline of labor which enslaves them for their own good.

Henry David Thoreau

What great interval is there between him who is caught in Africa and made a plantation slave of in the South, and him who is caught in New England and made a Unitarian minister of?

Henry David Thoreau

What we want is not mainly to colonize Nebraska with free men, but to colonize Massachusetts with free men-to be free ourselves. As the enterprise of a few individuals, that is brave and practical; but as the enterprise of the State, it is cowardice and imbecility. What odds where we squat, or bow much ground we cover? It is not the soil that we would make free, but men.

Henry David Thoreau

The mass of men are very easily imposed on. They have their runways in which they always travel, and are sure to fall into any pit or box-trap set therein.

Henry David Thoreau

Men talk of freedom! How many are free to think? Free from fear, from perturbation, from prejudice? Nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand are perfect slaves.

Henry David Thoreau

It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are yourself the slave-driver.

Henry David Thoreau

The English did not come to America from a mere love of adventure, nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under the crown, as the French to a great extent did, but to live in earnest and with freedom.

H. L. Mencken

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

H. L. Mencken

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

H. L. Mencken

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

H. L. Mencken

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

H. L. Mencken

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.

H. L. Mencken

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H. L. Mencken

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

H. L. Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.

Jesse Jackson

In politics, an organized minority is a political majority.

Fulton J. Sheen

Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do as we ought. The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.

Franklin P. Adams

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.

Franz Grillparzer

German radicalism: freedom-masturbation.

Franz Grillparzer

Robespierre, this pedant of freedom!

Franz Grillparzer

You ardently strive for freedom, and I do wish you were free--but, rather than for your sake, so that government won't be.

Franz Grillparzer

Genius resembles a bell; in order to ring it must be suspended into pure air, and when a foreign body touches it, its joyful toneis silenced.

Jeb Bush

The notion that somehow you're going to have freedom just kind of outbreak in Cuba, I think is false.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

George Will

The First Amendment is not a blanket freedom-of-information act. The constitutional newsgathering freedom means the media can go where the public can, but enjoys no superior right of access.

George Sand

You may impose silence upon me, but you can not prevent me from thinking.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Democracy is good. I say this because other systems are worse.