Famous Quotes & Sayings

Tacitus

Corruptisima republica plurimae leges.

Sophie Swetchine

The most culpable of the excesses of Liberty is the harm she does herself.

Sophie Swetchine

Liberty must be a mighty thing; for by it God punishes and rewards nations.

Thomas B. Macaulay

None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller.

Thomas B. Macaulay

And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?

Thomas Hobbes

I know not how the world will receive it, nor how it may reflect on those that shall seem to favor it. For in a way beset with those that contend, on one side for too great Liberty , and on the other side for too much Authority , 'tis hard to passe between the points of both unwounded.

Thomas Hobbes

Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Thomas Hobbes

What reason is there that he which laboreth much, and, sparing the fruits of his labor, consumeth little, should be more charged than he that, living idly, getteth little and spendeth all he gets, seeing the one hath no more protection from the commonwealth than the other?

Thomas Hobbes

Subjects have no greater liberty in a popular than in a monarchial state. That which deceives them is the equal participation of command.

Thomas Hobbes

There are very few so foolish that they had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others.

Thomas Jefferson

That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone.

Thomas Jefferson

Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers (adminstrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery.

Thomas Friedman

Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.

William J. Clinton

I can spend your money better than you can.

William J. Clinton

The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth.

Will Durant

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.

Will Durant

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

Will Durant

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

Robin Ince

I have spent a reasonable percentage of my life in libraries - I like the hush.

Robert Nozick

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor.

Robert Nozick

Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Seizing the results of someone's labor is equivalent to seizing hours from him and directing him to carry on various activities.

Richelle Mead

Oh God. Why, oh why, did I have to be the one to deliver this news? Why couldn’t I be locked away in my room or the library doing something enjoyable, like homework?

Thomas Sowell

I am so old that I can remember when liberals were liberal - instead of being intolerant of anything and anybody that is not politically correct.

Thomas Sowell

We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.

Thomas Sowell

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

Thomas Sowell

There is no talent so ardently supported, nor generously rewarded, as the ability to convince parasites they are victims.

Thomas Sowell

There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse.

Thomas Sowell

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

Thomas Reed

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.

Richard Lovelace

Fishes that tipple in the deep, Know no such liberty.

Richard Russo

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

Sarah Fielding

But in all things whether we shall make only a due use of the liberties we have asked, is left entirely to the judicious reader to decide.

Roger Scruton

[Burke] emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of militant irrationality.