Albert Einstein

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom." ~ Albert Einstein

Adlai Stevenson

"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." ~ Adlai Stevenson

Vanya Cohen

"When there's a single thief, it's robbery.  When there are a thousand thieves, it's taxation."  ~Vanya Cohen

H.L. Mencken

"Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." ~ H.L. Mencken

"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on 'I am not too sure'."  ~ H.L. Mencken

"All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good." ~ H.L. Mencken

"My old suggestion that public offices be filled by drawing lots, as a jury box is filled, was probably more intelligent than I suspected. It has been criticized on the ground that selecting a man at random would probably produce some extremely bad State governors....But I incline to believe that it would be best to choose members of the Legislature quite at random. No matter how stupid they were, they could not be more stupid than the average legislator under the present system. Certainly, they'd be measurably more honest, taking one with another. Finally, there would be the great advantage that all of them had got their jobs unwillingly, and were eager, not to spin out their sessions endlessly, but to get home as soon as possible." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling." ~ H.L. Mencken

"No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time." ~ H.L. Mencken

"There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time." ~ H.L. Mencken

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Sunday — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." ~ H.L. Mencken

"If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say." ~ H.L. Mencken

"I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans." ~ H.L. Mencken

"When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel." ~ H.L. Mencken

"[Referring to FDR] If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle — a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel." ~ H.L. Mencken

"Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?
A: Why do men go to zoos?" ~ H.L. Mencken

"What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar." ~ H.L. Mencken

"[The average man] is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies." ~ H.L. Mencken

"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth." ~ H.L. Mencken
 

"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." ~ H.L. Mencken

"To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am — a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions — can be so happy as he can be in the United States." ~ H.L. Mencken

"To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride." ~ H.L. Mencken

"It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground." ~ H.L. Mencken

"As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. 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

"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre...." ~ H.L. Mencken

Bertrand Russell

"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action." ~ Bertrand Russell


E.B. White

"The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war." ~ E.B. White

Georg Christoph Lichtenber

"Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own." ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenber


David Galland

"...the very idea that some faceless government functionary can walk into my house, or my office, at any time and on any pretense and require me to spend my time and resources assisting him in going over my books so that he may demand more money from me ­ money that will then flow through the machine to be used to purposes I find personally abhorrent -- is a truly warped and disturbing concept." ~ David Galland


Charles Bukowski

"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting." ~Charles Bukowski

Henry Miller

"Living apart and at peace with myself, I came to realize more vividly the meaning of the doctrine of acceptance. To refrain from giving advice, to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, to refrain, even though the motives be the highest, from tampering with another's way of life - so simple, yet so difficult for an active spirit. Hands off!" ~ Henry Miller


C.P. Snow

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion." ~ C.P. Snow

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lord Acton

"At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities...." ~ Lord Acton

John Adams

"Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people." ~ John Adams

"The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing." ~ John Adams

"Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?" ~ John Adams

"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws...." ~ John Adams

"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

John Quincy Adams

"The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy." ~ John Quincy Adams

Samuel Adams

"No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders." ~ Samuel Adams

"The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men." ~ Samuel Adams

"A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader..." ~ Samuel Adams

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds." ~ Samuel Adams

"Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can." ~ Samuel Adams

Joseph Addison

"A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty Is worth a whole eternity in bondage." ~ Joseph Addison

Mortimer Adler

"Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men." ~ Mortimer Adler

Aeschylus

"Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny." ~ Aeschylus

Donald Alexander

"We now have so many regulations that everyone is guilty of some violation." ~ Donald Alexander

 

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