“When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the state.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” ——John Adams
“A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you.” ——Ramsey Clark
“It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.” ——Dorothy Thompson
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” ——Rudyard Kipling
“I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.” ——Thomas Paine
“Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.” ——Oswald Spengler
“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal — that there is no human relation between master and slave.” ——Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
“I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever, in religion, in philosophy, in politics or in anything else, where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to Heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you — the social reformers — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.” ——Isaiah Berlin
“Information is the currency of Democracy. In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock. If all the people knew all the facts, they would never make a mistake. It is better for one hundred guilty men to go free than one innocent man to go to jail. It is wrong to take a man’s money and use it to promote ideas he does not agree with. It’s better to debate an issue without settling it than to settle an issue without debate. The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Political correctness is really a subjective list put together by the few to rule the many — a list of things one must think, say, or do. It affronts the right of the individual to establish his or her own beliefs.” ——Mark Berley
“All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.” ——Isaiah Berlin
“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.” ——Martin Luther King, Jr.
“My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest shall have the same opportunities as the strongest… no country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak… Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism… true democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.” ——Gandhi
“There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life — happiness, freedom, and peace of mind — are always attained by giving them to someone else.” ——Peyton Conway March
“A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited.” ——Herbert Spencer
“Protest that endures is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.” ——Wendell Berry
“Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” ——Thomas Paine
“The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men.” ——Robert G. Ingersoll
“Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.” ——William Godwin
“But this is slavery, not to speak one’s thought.” ——Euripides
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” ——Frederick Douglass
“Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our Fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” ——Abraham Lincoln
“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.” ——Henry David Thoreau
“I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.” ——Horace Greeley
“Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind.” ——Henry Grady Weaver
“Power, after all, is not just military strength. It is the social power that comes from democracy, the cultural power that comes from freedom of expression and research, the personal power that entitles every Arab citizen to feel that he or she is in fact a citizen, and not just a sheep in some great shepherd’s flock.” ——Edward Said
“It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” ——David Hume
“I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the Declaration of Independence that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.” ——Abraham Lincoln
“The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.” ——Daniel Webster
“The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.” ——Saint Thomas Aquinas
“And reason teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.” ——John Locke
“No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).” ——Ayn Rand
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” ——Apostle Paul, (Gal. 5:1, NIV)
“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” ——Jesus, the Christ (John 8:36; Matt. 11:30, NIV)