Political Quotes – Found in “Information Clearing House Newsletter” (News You Won’t Find on CNN)
“People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to” – Malcolm Muggeridge
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“Lying is done with words and also with silence.” – Adrienne Rich
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“Can we truly expect those who aim to exploit us to be trusted to educate us?” – Eric Schaub Individualist, writer, activist, speaker Source: The Common Man
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“No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being…” — Benjamin Constant [Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque] (1767-1830) Swiss-born thinker, writer and French politician. Source: Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (1810) Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, (2003), p. 401-402.
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“Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.” – Woodrow Wilson: (1856-1924) 28th US President Speech, 1912
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“Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.” – Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi – (1869-1948)
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“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.” –Bertrand Russell
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“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.”: – Abraham Lincoln – (1809-1865) 16th US President
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“The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.” — Clarence S. Darrow -1857-1938 Source: Address to the Court, The Communist Trial, People v. Lloyd, 1920
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“The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it’s invalid on its face.” – Justice Potter Stewart : (1915-1985), U. S. Supreme Court Justice Source: Walker v. Birmingham, 1967
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“We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear — unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called ‘the insolence of elected persons’ — in a word, free men.” — Gerald W. Johnson – (1890-1980) Source: American Freedom and the Press, 1958
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“Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth having.” — Juvenal [Decimus Junius Juvenalis] (c.55-c.128 AD) Roman satirical poet
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“The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.” — John Locke (1632-1704) English philosopher and political theorist. Considered the ideological progenitor of the American Revolution and who, by far, was the most often non-biblical writer quoted by the Founding Fathers of the USA. 1693
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“War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.” — Major General Smedley Darling Butler (1981-1940) Major General USMC, “Old Gimlet Eye” and “Hell Devil Darling”, most highly decorated military men from the pre-World War II era. Source: from a speech in 1933
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“The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.” – Joseph Paul Goebbels (1897-1945) Nazi Propaganda Minister – Source: The Göebbels Diaries, 1942-1943
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Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison: Henry David Thoreau:
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You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.: Clarence Darrow:
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The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with: Eleanor Holmes Norton:
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When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered: Dorothy Thompson:
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Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will: Frederick Douglass:
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None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free: Goethe:
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“We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – (1807-1882) American poet
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The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it – Omar Khayyam
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“No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” — George Mason – (1725-1792), drafted the Virgina Declaration of Rights, ally of James Madison and George Washington.
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“And I honor the man who is willing to sink Half his present repute for the freedom to think. And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak. Will risk t’ other half for the freedom to speak.” – James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) American author and diplomatist Source: A Fable for Critics, 1848
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“One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic.”- Josef Stalin – (1879-1953) Communist leader of the USSR
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“It may be your intent to be our masters; how can it be ours to be your slaves?” – Melians – Source: Melians to Athenians, Peloponnesian War, 431 BC
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“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”: – Voltaire – [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
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“By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy – indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction” : William Osler (Canadian Physician, 1849-1919)
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“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.” Albert Campus: The Plague, Modern Library Edition, p. 120
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War creates peace like hate creates love: David L. Wilson
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During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism: Howard Thurman
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“When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe; he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.”~Thomas Paine“The Age of Reason” 1793
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“Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves.”: Friedrich Nietzsche – (1844-1900) – Source: Twilight of the Idols, 1888
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“The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.”: Theodore Roosevelt – (1858-1919) 26th US President – Source: letter 01/10/1917
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“If… the machine of government… is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobediance, 1849
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“A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands — even for beneficial purposes — will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.”: John Stuart Mill – (1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
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“This country is not pro-American. It is United States property.”- Juan Bosch – President of the Dominican Republic Source: In 1965, the U.S. invaded the Dominican Republic to prevent the displacement of Donald Reid Cabral by Bosch’s constitutionally-elected government. New York Times, 6 June 1975
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“It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”- Voltaire – [François Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)
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“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country-when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”-Schurz, “The Policy of Imperialism,” Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, vol. 6, pp. 119-20 (1913).
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“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. “ : Ayn Rand in “The Nature of Government”
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Sam Smith: “Those who think history has left us helpless should recall the abolitionist of 1830, the feminist of 1870, the labor organizer of 1890, and the gay or lesbian writer of 1910. They, like us, did not get to choose their time in history but they, like us, did get to choose what they did with it. Knowing what we know now about how these things turned out, but also knowing how long it took, would we have been abolitionists in 1830, or feminists in 1870, and so on?”
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“It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us. Perhaps the reason is that rich men are very clever at covering up what they do.”: Andrew Greeley (Chicago Sun-Times, February 18, 2001):
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“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”: Plutarch – Mestrius Plutarchus (c. 46 AD- 127 AD) was a Greek historian, biographer, and essayist.
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