Speaking Freely
Quotes on Rights and Liberty #40
F.A. Hayek • 1889—1992
“Any kind of discrimination — be it on grounds of religion, political opinion, race, or whatever it is — seems to be incompatible with the idea of freedom under the law. Experience has shown that separate never is equal and cannot be equal.”
Christopher Isherwood • 1904—1986
“By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That’s the law of all spiritual progress.”
George Washington • 1732–1799
“I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”
Jane Austen • 1775–1817
“It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”
Grover Cleveland • 1837—1908
“It is said that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens.”
Milton Friedman • 1912–2006
“There’s a related strand of utopianism in the libertarian movement that I believe is also productive of intolerance and is fundamentally inconsistent with the basic values that I believe we stand for.”
Deirdre McCloskey • 1942 —
“The economy, like science or art, is more like an organism growing uncertainly toward the light than a steel machine repeating exactly today and tomorrow what it did yesterday.”
Ronald Reagan • 1904–2011
“If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
Seymour Martin Lipset • 1922–2006
“The gradual realization that extremist and intolerant movements in modern society are more likely to be based on the lower classes than on the middle and upper classes has posed a tragic dilemma for those intellectuals of the democratic left who once believed the proletariat necessarily to be a force for liberty, racial equality, and social progress.”
Mahatma Gandhi • 1869–1948
“Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.”
H.L. Mencken • 1880–1956
“Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”
Francis Nielson • 1867–1961
“Here we have a statement of the beneficence of a system of voluntary co-operation which is of great value. Unlimited individualism is what is essential if the cause of humanity, the brotherhood of man, is to triumph. That Socialism which is based upon the proposal: that the State shall control all the means of production, distribution, and exchange; for the equal benefit of all; and that the State shall have power to do what it wills with persons, their faculties, and their possessions, is a system of compulsory co-operation in which the individual is denied natural rights and will become the puppet of the State. Such a system cannot be other than a reversion to the worst form of despotism the world has known.”
Booker T. Washington • 1856–1915
“If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.”
Edward Godkin • 1831—1902
“To the principles and precepts of Liberalism the prodigious material progress of the age was largely due. Freed from the vexatious meddling of governments, men devoted themselves to their natural task, the bettering of their condition, with the wonderful results which surround us.”
Justice William Brennan • 1906–1997
“The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to ‘create’ rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.”
William Lloyd Garrison • 1805–1879
“With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.”
David Boaz • 1953—2024
“The most important factor in America’s economic future — in raising everyone’s standard of living — is not land, or money, or computers; it’s human talent.”
Billy Graham • 1918—2018
“I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”
Ludwig Mises • 1881–1973
“No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified… it stands in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism and democracy…”
Martin Luther King, Jr. • 1929–1968
“Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as an end within himself.”
Charles T. Sprading • 1871–1959
“Since liberty, being essential to the individual, is also necessary to the race; and since this necessitates limiting the liberty of each to the like liberty of all, we therefore arrive at the sociological Law of Equal Freedom.”
Thurgood Marshall • 1908–1993
“If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.”
Lincoln Chafee • 1953—
“Laws should be limited in their application to violations of the rights of others through force or fraud, or to deliberate actions that place others involuntarily at significant risk of harm.”
Emma Goldman • 1869–1940
“The almost limitless capacity of Puritanism for evil is due to its entrenchment behind the State and the law. Pretending to safeguard the people against “immorality,” it has impregnated the machinery of government and added to its usurpation of moral guardianship the legal censorship of our views, feelings, and even of our conduct.”
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