Quotes to consider to remind us of what Freedom truly requires of us!

"Real courage is found, not in the willingness to risk death, but in the willingness to stand, alone if necessary, against the ignorant and disapproving herd." Jon Roland, 1976

"You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free." Clarence Darrow

"Unfortunately, nothing will preserve [liberty] but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined." Patrick Henry

"Financial dependence on the state is the foundation of modern serfdom." G. Edward Griffin

"The purely defensive is doomed to defeat." Napoleon

"The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the party that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections." Lord Acton

"The contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal... We Americans are suckers for good news." Adlai Stevenson

"No man is free who is not a master of himself." Epictatus

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." Plato

"The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion." Edmund Burke

"Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity." Lord Acton

"Greater than the force of mighty armies is the power of an idea whose time has come." Victor Hugo

"The timid and fearful cannot defend liberty -- or anything else." - "The gates of heaven surely are closed to those who decline to oppose totalitarianism with all their might." G. Edward Griffin

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Wendell Phillips

"Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton

"Those who are not interested in politics will be forever ruled by those who are." G. Edward Griffin

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." Abraham Lincoln

"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it." Thomas Paine

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." Tacitus

"Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control." Lord Acton

"When the Goths are at the gates, forming study groups and praying for deliverance is not effective defense." G. Edward Griffin

"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" Patrick Henry

"The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." James Madison

"The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts." Edmund Burke

"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." James Madison

"Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." James Madison

"First they came for the communists, and I did not speak up, because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." Pastor Martin Niemoller

"We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy. We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called 'isolationism.'" Pat Buchanan

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." Edmund Burke

"Life is hollow without health and freedom. To seek one while ignoring the other is folly." G. Edward Griffin

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." George Santayana

"The number of people that can reason well is much smaller than those that can reason badly. If reasoning were like hauling rocks, then several reasoners might be better than one. But reasoning isn't like hauling rocks, it's like, it's like racing, where a single, galloping Barbary steed easily outruns a hundred wagon-pulling horses." Galileo

"In regard to the philosophers, if they be true philosophers, i.e., lovers of truth, they should not be irritated that the earth moves. Rather, if they realize that they have held a false belief, they should thank those have shown them the truth; and if their opinion stands firm that the earth doesn’t move, they will have reason to boast than be angered. Galileo

The theologians also should not be irritated. For if they find that this opinion is false, then they would be free to condemn it; and if they discover that it is true, they ought to thank those who have opened the way to finding the true sense of the Scriptures and who have prevented them from falling into the grave scandal of condemning a true proposition." Galileo

"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." Samuel Adams

"It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings. ... Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things, which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. ... Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" Patrick Henry

"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves." Dresden James.

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies" - Friedrich Nietzsche

"It requires courage to utter truth; for the higher Truth lifts her voice, the louder will error scream, until its inarticulate sound is forever silenced in oblivion" Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science

"A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." Dresden James.

"That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt

"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage, torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, and bombing of civilians, which does not change its moral color when it is committed by our side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." - George Orwell

"Under the Bush administration, openness and accountability have been replaced by secrecy and evasion of responsibility. They abuse their power, conceal their actions from the American people, and refuse to hold officials accountable." - Senator Edward M. Kennedy

"The voters decide nothing. Those that count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin

"Falsehood is an amorphous monster, conceived in the brain of knaves and brought forth by the breath of fools. It's a mortal pestilence, a miasmic vapor that passes, like a blast from hell, over the face of the world and is gone forever. It may leave death in its wake and disaster dire; it may place on the brow of purity the brand of the courtesan and cover the hero with the stigma of the coward; it may wreck hopes and ruin homes, cause blood to flow and hearts to break; it may pollute the altar and disgrace the throne, corrupt the courts and curse the land, but the lie cannot live forever, and when it's dead and damned there's none so poor as to do it reverence." - William Cowper Brann

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." - H.L. Mencken

"A government official is a man who has risen from obscurity to something worse." - Pat Robertson

"When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest." - John Thomas

"When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law." Frederic Bastiat

"People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction." - James Baldwin

"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw

"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." - Henry Kissinger

"Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Winston Churchill

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin, 1759

"If A Nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be" - Thomas Jefferson.

"Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it political? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular - but one must take it simply because it is right." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless... the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is [now] while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion." - Thomas Jefferson

"The gun gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Let your gun, therefore, be the constant companion of your walks." - Thomas Jefferson

"No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion." - James Burgh, Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses [London, 1774-1775].

"Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence be the_real_object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?" Patrick Henry

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error." - Justice Robert H. Jackson

"Without freedom there will be no firearms among the people; without firearms among the people there will not long be freedom. Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain relatively free after the people have been disarmed, but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or existing where the people have personal arms." - Neal Knox

"If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case: you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." - Winston Churchill

"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms.... The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible." - Hubert H. Humphrey (1911-1978) US Vice-President, US Senator (D-MN) Source: "Know Your Lawmakers," Guns magazine, February 1960, p.6

"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." - JOHN BRADSHAW

"I do believe that where there is a choice only between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have done had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908 [by an Indian extremist opposed to Gandhi's agreement with Smuts], whether he should have run away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defend me, I told him it was his duty to defend me even by using violence. Hence it was that I took part in the Boer War, the so-called Zulu Rebellion and [World War I]. Hence also do I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of violence. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor." - Mohandas K. Gandhi, Young India, August 11, 1920 from Fischer, Louis ed.,The Essential Gandhi, 1962

"We the people 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

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it." - JUSTICE LEARNED HAND

"Fear not the truth for the lack of people walking on it." John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"One man with courage is a majority." - Thomas Jefferson

"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." --Thomas Jefferson

"Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience." -- John Locke, 1690

"The people are the ultimate guardians of their own liberties. In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy . . . Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone." --Thomas Jefferson

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." --Benito Mussolini (cited by Lewis Lapham in Harper's, January 2002)

"An evil exists that threatens every man, woman, and child of this great nation.  We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland." --Adolf Hitler, proposing the creation of the Gestapo in nazi Germany

"America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home." Mark Twain

"The most effective means of preventing tyranny is to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts." --Thomas Jefferson

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair." --H.L. Mencken

"To consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy." -- Thomas Jefferson

"The limitation of tyrants is the endurance of those they oppose." - Frederick Douglass

"There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpation." - James Madison

&hose who have the privilege to know, have the duty to act." Albert Einstein

"The essence of constitutionalism in a democracy is not merely to shape and condition the nature of majorities, but also to stipulate that certain things are impermissible, no matter how large and fervent a majority might want them." - George Will

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert Heinlein

"Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance. Let us remember that 'if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.' It is a very serious consideration...that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event." --Samuel Adams, speech in Boston, 1771

"Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins." - Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, whose testimony convicted John Gotti.

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do." - Edward Everett Hale

"Arms are the only true badges of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave." - Andrew Fletcher 1698

"Those who lay down on their rights make it harder for those who stand up for theirs." - Author Unknown

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury." - Alexander Tyler (in his 1770 book, Cycle of Democracy)

"Judges ought to remember that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law." --Francis Bacon, From "The Essays of Counsels, Civil and Moral"

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of men and women." - Thomas Paine, The Crisis, Intro. (Dec. 1776).

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human liberty; it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." - William Pitt

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States....Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America" - Gazette of the United States, October 14, 1789.

"Allowing riflery training while decrying gun violence doesn't send a mixed message any more than does supporting a wrestling team while opposing schoolyard brawls." - CHICAGO TRIBUNE

"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away." - BARRY GOLDWATER (1964)

"Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them." - George Santayana

"I now think the only way to control handgun use is to prohibit the guns. And the only way to do that is to change the Constitution." - M. Gartner, then President of NBC News, USA Today, January 16, 1992, pg. A9

"Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened." - Billy Graham

"Gun bans don't disarm criminals, gun bans attract them." - WALTER MONDALE

"The power of the state is measured by the power that men surrender to it." - Felix Morley

"Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever." - LORD THOMAS MACAULAY

"Both the oligarch and Tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of arms." - Aristotle

"Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins ... Society is in every state a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." - THOMAS PAINE

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!" -Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (Chapter 1 "Arrest")

"Americans who value freedom had better be more concerned about the gun control crowd than the criminals. The criminals want your money. The Neo-Totalitarians want your freedom." - Charlie Reese

"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words "no" and "not" employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights." - EDMUND A. OPITZ

"Government that seeks its own preservation looks upon the strength and bravery of the people as the root of its greatest danger; and desires to render them weak, base, corrupt and unfaithful to each other, that they may neither dare to attempt the breaking of the yoke laid upon them, nor trust one another in any generous design for the recovery of their liberty." - Sidney

"Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the constitution they don't like." - Alan Dershowitz

"It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of protecting themselves by arms and be so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion." - Aristotle

"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it." - DANIEL WEBSTER (1834)

"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was every invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin .. Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again .. Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in .. But if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit." - Sir Josiah Stamp, President, Bank of England, 1920's.

"...but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights..." - Alexander Hamilton speaking of standing armies in Federalist No. 29.

"When the government fears the People, that is Liberty. When the People fear the Government, that is tyranny." - THOMAS JEFFERSON

"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security ... To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted. Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) ... You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. - "German professor after World War II describing the rise of Nazism to a journalist

"It is also in the interests of a tyrant to keep his people poor, so that they may not be able to afford the cost of protecting themselves by arms and be so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for rebellion." - Aristotle

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it." - William Burroughs, 1992

"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantages... will bear its burden without complaint, and perhaps without suspecting the system is inimical to their best interests." - Rothchilds

"The news and truth are not the same thing." - Walter Lippmann

"This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other." - Benjamin Franklin

"In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot." - Mark Twain

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison

"Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." - Frederick Douglass

"Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgement and nothing can help you escape it - that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life..." - Ayn Rand in "Atlas Shrugged"

"Reporters today are far removed from America's founding values and are alarmed and contemptuous of gun owners as dangerous lower classes." - HENRY ALLEN, WASHINGTON POST

"You do not examine legislation in light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." - LYNDON B. JOHNSON

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." - Abraham Lincoln

"Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing." - Neil Postman

"Americans cannot escape a certain responsibility for what is done in our name around the world. In a democracy, even one as corrupted as ours, ultimate authority rests with the people. We empower the government with our votes, finance it with our taxes, bolster it with our silent acquiescence. If we are passive in the face of America's official actions overseas, we in effect endorse them." - Mark Hertzgaard

"You must understand, therefore, that there are two ways of fighting: by law or by force. The first way is natural to men, and the second to beasts. But as the first way often proves inadequate one must have recourse to the second." - Niccolo Machiavelli in "The Prince."

"While vast sums of money are being siphoned off into hidden [military] coffers, Americas schools, hospitals and public services are facing cutbacks and closures." - Representative Henry Waxman

"If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, - not democracy... But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country." - Michael Parenti

"Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others." - WlLLlAM ALLEN WHITE

"...to disarm the people - that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them." - George Mason, 3 Elliot, Debates at 380.

"The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus." - Noam Chomsky

"The trauma of 9/11 stimulated infinite possibilities for worry - some quite plausible, but most inspired by remote what-if fantasies. A society bingeing on fear makes itself vulnerable to far more profound forms of destruction than terror attacks. The "terrorism war", like a nostalgic echo of the cold war, is using these popular fears to advance a different agenda - the re-engineering of American life through permanent mobilization." - William Greider

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it." - THOMAS JEFFERSON (1791)

"Democracy is not about trust; it is about distrust. It is about accountability, exposure, open debate, critical challenge, and popular input and feedback from the citizenry. It is about responsible government. We have to get our fellow Americans to trust their leaders less and themselves more, trust their own questions and suspicions, and their own desire to know what is going on." - Michael Parenti

"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." - James Madison, The Federalist Papers, No. 46

"To become informed and hold government accountable, the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes, not cosmetic images and airy promises. But that is not what the public demands." - Eric Alterman

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German philosopher

"The men and women who enlist in this country's military [should] be told the truth that they are not protecting the United States, they are and always have been protecting corporate interests." - Chante Wolf, Veterans for Peace activist

"The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets." -Lawrence Grossman - longtime head of PBS and NBC News

"War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press ... have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence - death - is hidden from public view." - Chris Hedges

"A tiny portion of the population controls the lion's share of the wealth and most of the command positions of state, manufacturing, banking, investment, publishing, higher education, philanthropy, and media... these individuals exercise a preponderant influence over what is passed off as public information and democratic discourse." - Michael Parenti

"One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." - DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

"Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth." - Mark Crispin Miller

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." - Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

"Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak." - George Orwell

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. LEWIS

"With each newly minted crisis, US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario. They start demonizing a foreign leader ... charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably "anti-American" and "anti-West." Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public ... are swept along." - Michael Parenti

"When a republic's most venerable institutions no longer operate as they were intended, it becomes possible for small cabals to usurp power, and, while keeping the forms, corrupt the function of those institutions for their own ends. Looking at things that way, the George W. Bush presidency has been both result and symptom of the decadence of America's constitutional mechanisms." - T.D. Allman

"Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care, free whatever? It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell." - Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle of Houston

"Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations..." - Noam Chomsky

"America's punitive and reactive response to crime is an integral part of the new social Darwinism, the criminal justice counterpart of an increasingly harsh attack on living standards and social supports, especially for the poor ... America [is] a society in which a permanent state of social disintegration is held in check only by the creation of a swollen apparatus of confinement and control that has no counterpart in our own history or in any other industrial democracy." - Elliott Currie, Crime and Punishment in America

"The quest for homeland security is heading ... toward the quasi-militarization of everyday life ... If danger might lurk anywhere, maybe everything must be protected and policed." - William Greider

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country..." - James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434, June 8, 1789.

"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves." - Howard Zinn, historian and author

"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship." - William Blum - Rogue State, on how governments control their citizens

"The United States is not only number one in military power but also in the effectiveness of its propaganda system." - Edward S. Herman, political economist and author

"In the United States, both the upper levels of the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pay of the corporate media and communication giants." - Robert McChesney and John Nichols, media critics and authors

" What would have happened if millions of American and British people, struggling with coupons and lines at the gas stations, had learned that in 1942 Standard Oil of New Jersey [part of the Rockefeller empire] managers shipped the enemy's fuel through neutral Switzerland and that the enemy was shipping Allied fuel? Suppose the public had discovered that the Chase Bank in Nazi-occupied Paris after Pearl Harbor was doing millions of dollars' worth of business with the enemy with the full knowledge of the head office in Manhattan [the Rockefeller family among others?] Or that Ford trucks were being built for the German occupation troops in France with authorization from Dearborn, Michigan? Or that Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of the international American telephone conglomerate ITT, flew from New York to Madrid to Berne during the war to help improve Hitler's communications systems and improve the robot bombs that devastated London? Or that ITT built the FockeWulfs that dropped bombs on British and American troops? Or that crucial balI bearings were shipped to Nazi-associated customers in Latin America with the collusion of the vice-chairman of the U.S. War Production Board in partnership with Goering's cousin in Philadelphia when American forces were desperately short of them? Or that such arrangements were known about in Washington and either sanctioned or deliberately ignored?" - Charles Higham, researcher, about U.S.-Nazi collaboration during WWII

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in such twilight that we must be aware of the change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." - Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas:

" The Lion asked the Wizard one time, 'When does a slave become a king?' When You start acting like one! Otherwise You remain a slave all Your life." - Author unknown.

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it" - always. - Mahatma Gandhi

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." Mark Twain

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.... But then I repeat myself." -Mark Twain

"I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." -Winston Churchill

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." - George Bernard Shaw

"A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money." -G Gordon Liddy

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner." -James Bovard, Civil Libertarian (1994)

"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries." -Douglas Casey, Classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." -P.J. O'Rourke, Civil Libertarian

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." -Frederic Bastiat, French Economist (1801-1850)

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan (1986)

"I don't make jokes I just watch the government And report the facts." -Will Rogers

"If you think health care is expensive now, Wait until you see what it costs when it's free!" -P.J. O'Rourke

"In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other." -Voltaire (1764)

"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you!" -Pericles (430 B.C.)

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." -Mark Twain (1866 )

"Talk is cheap...except when Congress does it." -Unknown

"The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other." -Ronald Reagan

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery." -Winston Churchill

"The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin" -Mark Twain

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." -Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

"There is no distinctly Native American criminal class...save Congress." -Mark Twain

"What this country needs are more unemployed politicians." -Edward Langley, Artist (1928 - 1995)

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." -Thomas Jefferson