Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Herbert Hoover

A splendid storehouse of integrity and freedom has been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. In this day of confusion, of peril to liberty, our high duty is to see that this storehouse is not robbed of its contents.

Herbert Hoover

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

Gerald Massey

I was a dweller amid shadows grim: Till FREEDOM touched my yearning eyes, and lo! Life in a shining circle, rounding rose, As heaven on heaven goes up the jewell'd night. New floods of passionate life swirl'd at my heart, Like Ocean-surges rolling round the world: And FREEDOM was my glittering Bride.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty.

Ian Stewart

Chaos is lawless behavior governed entirely by law.

Hugo Black

The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.

Hugo Black

Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write.

Hugh Downs

The price of freedom is responsibility, but it's a bargain, because freedom is priceless.

Hosea Ballou

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Horace

We are free to yield to truth.

Horace

Painters and poets alike have always had license to dare anything! We know that, and we both claim and allow to others in their turn this indulgence.