Remember: Freedom isn't free; free men are not equal; equal men are not free.
   —Anonymous

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
   —C.G. Jung

If a man is not a liberal at the age of 20, he has no heart. If a man is not a conservative by the age of 40, he has no brain.
   —Winston Churchill

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
   —John Stuart Mill

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.
   —Edward R. Murrow

What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without restraint. Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
   —Edmund Burke

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?
   —Joseph Stalin

Self-government without self-dicipline doesn't work.
   —Paul Harvey

I sought for the key to the greatness and genius of America in her harbors; in her fertile fields and boundless forests; in her rich mines and vast world commerce; in her public school system and institutions of learning. I sought for it in her democratic Congress and in her matchless Constitution. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
   —Alexis de Tocqueville

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
   —Teddy Roosevelt

Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, "What should be the reward of such sacrifices?" If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!
   —Samuel Adams

In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us."
   —Dosteovsky's "Grand Inquisitor"

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
   —Aldous Huxley

Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hangs on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.
   —Ludwig von Mises

People demand freedom of speech to make up for freedom of thought which they avoid.
   —Søren Kierkegaard

The day the second amendment is repealed, is the day it was meant for.
   —Anonymous

You can get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun, than with a kind word alone.
   —Al Capone

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.
   —Mark Twain

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you're a good person is like expecting a bull not to attack you because you're a vegetarian.
   —Dennis Wholey

America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to "the common good," but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America's industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.
   —Ayn Rand

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.
   —H. L. Mencken

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
   —T. S. Eliot

Politicians never accuse you of "greed" for wanting other people's money—only for wanting to keep your own money.
   —Joseph Sobran

A liberal is a man who will give away everything he doesn't own.
   —Frank Dane

It isn't that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so.
   —Ronald Reagan

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
   —Margaret Thatcher

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents "interests," I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
   —Barry Goldwater

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
   —Ronald Reagan

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
   —Ayn Rand

Racism isn't dead, but it is on life support—kept alive by politicians, race hustlers, and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as "racist."
   —Thomas Sowell

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
   —Henry David Thoreau

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.
   —Henry David Thoreau

A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
   —Milton Freedman

How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
   —Ronald Reagan

Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow's too lazy to form an opinion.
   —Will Rogers

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
   —Abraham Lincoln

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal responsibility, always followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world's great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years. These nations have progressed in this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.
   —Alexander Tytler, 1770

In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.
   —Voltaire

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
   —James Madison

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
   —H. L. Mencken

The man who lives his own life, and wears it out, can dispense with the need of taking it with him. He dies his own death or he goes on living, and where the life has worn in the death will come out. Skin and bones, jacket and shoes, tools, sheds and machines wear out; even the land wears out and the seat wears off the cane-bottom chair. The palms wear off the gloves, the cuffs off the sleeves, the nickel off the door-knobs, the plate off the silver, the flowers off the plates, the enamel off the dipper, the label off the floursacks, the varnish off the checkers, and the gold off the Christmas jewelry, but every day the nap wears off the carpet, the figure in the carpet wears in. The pattern for living, for hanging in there, can be seen in the white stitches in the denim, the Time Piece stamped like a medallion in the bib of the overalls. Between wearing something in and wearing it out the line is vague as the receding horizon, and as hard to account for as the missing hairs of a brush. That's how it happened. That's how the figure on the front of the carpet got around to the back.
   —Wright Morris

A human being is part of the whole called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his own consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, it is the source of all true art and science.
   —Albert Einstein

Outside the warm, plush environment of civilization we all enter the food chain, and not always necessarily at the top.
   —Anonymous

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are small and crunchy, and good with ketchup.
   —Anonymous

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
   —Robert F. Kennedy, South Africa, 1966

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

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.
   —Mignon McLaughlin

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
   —Thomas A. Kempis

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
   —George Bernard Shaw

An honest man is always in trouble.
   —Henry Fool, in the movie "Henry Fool"

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
   —John Galsworthy

The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.
   —Vince Lombardi

It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.
   —Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

That many of you are frustrated in your ambitions, and undernourished in your pleasures, only makes you more venomous. Quite rightly. If I found myself in your position, I would not be charitable either.
   —Henry David Thoreau

The problem with you conservatives is you have such simple solutions to very complex problems.
   —Phil Donahue to Cal Thomas

The problem with you liberals is that you've ignored the simple solutions, which has caused the problems to become so complex.
   —Cal Thomas to Phil Donahue

There are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want. And the other is getting it.
   —Oscar Wilde

The faults we first see in others are the faults that are our own.
   —Honore de Balzac

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
   —Denis Diderot

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment, and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
   —Edmund Burke

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
   —Theodore Roosevelt, 1915

There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language; and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.
   —Theodore Roosevelt, 1919

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
   —G.K. Chesterton

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
   —George Orwell

Understanding, on any level, is difficult to achieve. Here in the United States we have a population that combines personal commitment with intellectual detachment, and even disbelief. We have people who work hard, but refuse to think; refuse to add things up. There is a widespread conviction that nothing has a larger meaning.
   —Otto Scott

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
   —Voltaire

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.
   —Eleanor Roosevelt

Republicans are preferable to Democrats because they believe in the right to bear arms. If you disagree strongly enough with them you can shoot them.
   —P. J. O’Rourke

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
   —Benjamin Franklin

If money is your hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
   —Henry Ford

90% of the people in the world are idiots. Everybody knows this, and thinks they are part of the other 10%.
   —Anonymous

If you are angry with someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. Then you'll be a mile away from them, and you'll have their shoes.
   —Anonymous

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
   —Bertrand Russell

Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation: for 'tis better to be alone than to be in bad company.
   —George Washington

Love your country, but fear your government.
   —Anonymous

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It is merely twice as large as it needs to be.
   —Anonymous

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
   —Aldous Huxley

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
   —Frederic Bastiat

When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
   —Chief Tecumseh

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
   —Chief Crowfoot

After all the great religions have been preached and expounded, or have been revealed by brilliant scholars, or have been written in fine books and embellished in fine language with fine covers, man is still confronted with the Great Mystery.
   —Chief Luther Standing Bear

Happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.
   —Chuang-Tzu

Discipline yourself and others won't have to.
   —John Wooden

He that would govern others, first should be the master of himself.
   —Philip Massinger

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
   —Aesop

The early bird may catch the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese.
   —Anonymous

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
   —Franz Kafka

Heaven ghostly, is as high down as up, and up as down: behind as before, before as behind, on one side as another. Insomuch, that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then that same time he were in heaven ghostly. For the high and the next way thither is run by desires and not by paces of feet.
   —The Cloud of Unknowing (14th Century text)

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
   —Henry David Thoreau

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
   —Flaubert

How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.
   —Robert A. Heinlein

I don't believe in destiny. You change your destiny with every decision you make each day. I don't believe God put us here and said, "This is your destiny." I believe God gives you opportunities; that is your destiny.
   —Jimbo Fisher

You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
   —C. S. Lewis

You can ignore reality, but you can't avoid the consequences of ignoring reality.
   —Anonymous

The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one does not live in the cradle forever.
   —Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1895

We do not know one millionth of one percent about anything.
   —Thomas Edison

Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.
   —H. G. Wells

Humanity is a decaying carcass, awaiting the vultures of judgment.
   —Anonymous

Truth is a pathless land.
   —Krishnamurti

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
   —The Dalai Lama

It's shocking to emerge from prison and feel like you're still not free. What I've learned is that freedom is not some place you finally arrive at one day. It's an action, one that you have to practice every day for the rest of your life, regardless if anyone is watching.
   —Amanda Knox

When you stop wondering, you might as well put your rocker on the front porch and call it a day.
   —Johnny Carson