10 Quotes About Civil Liberty

"Liberty is the right of every individual to live in a society where his personal choices need not be submitted to the dominion of another." - John Stuart Mill "That which is not forbidden is compulsory." - Voltaire "If you wish to make an impression on people, make it with your heart and not with your fist." - Mahatma Gandhi "The umbrella of liberty must be carried forward and expanded." - Martin Luther King, Jr. "The most poignant and beautiful eulogies are those made at the moment of death. I would like to think that this is what we offer when we die: that we die not for ourselves but for others; that we die with love in our hearts, on our lips, on our sleeves, on our sleeves." - George Carlin "There are two ways about this world. Either you have got to have a thick skin or you have got to have a heart Read more

If you can't do both, you go on being a coward all your life." - James Baldwin "Through the years of my life, I have found that there is no more effective way of making people happy than by making them laugh." - Mark Twain "I have learned that it is the right of every man to speak his mind freely, but I have learned still more that it is his duty to speak it wisely." - Leo Tolstoy "The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates "There is no remedy for love but to love more" - Thoreau

You can control the visibility of my name and my...
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You can control the visibility of my name and my popularity, but you cannot control the frequency at which people are quoting me. Truth always rises with time. Suzy Kassem
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Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier – and much, much harder. Suzy Kassem
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It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns 'privately with the administration.' That's just a small sliver of Johnson's radicalism: replacing Feingold in the Senate with Ron Johnson would be a civil liberties travesty analogous to the economic travesty from, say, replacing Bernie Sanders with Lloyd Blankfein. Glenn Greenwald
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On problems finding female ancestors, of any background, remember "I cannot put gas in my car without a note from my husband. The Car, the house, and everything else I think that I own is in his name. When I die, I cannot decide who will receive my personal effects. If he dies first I may be allowed to stay in my own home, or may be given a certain number of days to vacate the premises. Any real estate I inherit from my husband is not mine to sell of devise in a will. All the money I earn belongs to my husband. I cannot operate or engage in business in my own name. If my ancestor is enslaved, I cannot marry, may not be allowed to raise my own children, join a church, travel freely, own property or testify against those who harm me. Christina Kassabian Schaefer
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For the hundreds of thousands of Californians in gay and lesbian households who are managing their day-to-day lives, this decision affirms the full legal protections and safeguards I believe everyone deserves. Arnold Schwarzenegger
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From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis.In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness. Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution. We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends, has too frequently been used by the Nation and the States as a means for effecting the disgrace and degradation of private persons. Unscrupulous demagogues have used the power to investigate as tyrants of an earlier day used the bill of attainder. The architects of fear have converted a wholesome law against conspiracy into an instrument for making association a crime. Pretending to fear government they have asked government to outlaw private protest. They glorify "togetherness" when it is theirs, and call it conspiracy when it is that of others. In listing these abuses I do not mean to condemn our central effort to protect the Nation's security. The dangers that surround us have been very great, and many of our measures of vigilance have ample justification. Yet there are few among us who do not share a portion of the blame for not recognizing soon enough the dark tendency towards excess of caution. John F. Kennedy
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Trying to erase, hide, discredit, degrade, and suppress a writer's work, merit, voice, and influence―is unconstitutional. Censorship only exists to protect corruption. Suzy Kassem
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Throughout world history, all freedom has been no more than repetitious abolishment of what has already been abolished. There is no end to the killing of weeds. Warren Eyster
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Nine out of ten eugenicists in the 20th Century were also Progressives or Socialists, as central to the eugenic creed is the desire to engineer and centrally plan human reproduction and heredity. These were not people that believed in individual liberty. They certainly didn't believe the individual had the right to chose their own mate freely. They were statists, They were totalitarians at heart. . A.E. Samaan