Isaiah Berlin was wrong: not all attempts to change the world for the better lead to tyranny. ibid.
By the 1980s it was clear that the promises of the civil rights’ movement had not been kept in America. And the idealism of black politics fell away. And the communities divided into gangs then turned on each other. Then Crack swept through the black communities in America. And a fading Shakur finally gave up: she became addicted to Crack, and Tupac found himself alone. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? ***** BBC 2021
The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty. James Madison
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen. Samuel Adams
Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty. Samuel Adams
You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. Winston Churchill, broadcast to the United States from London 16 October 1938
Dictatorship – the fetish worship of one man – is a passing phase. A state of society where men may not speak their minds, where children denounce their parents to the police, where a business man or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinions; such a state of society cannot long endure if brought into contact with the healthy outside world. The light of civilised progress with its tolerances and co-operation, with its dignities and joys, has often in the past been blotted out. ibid.
The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist. Winston Churchill
Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights – the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Christopher Hitchens
In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test. Christopher Hitchens, ‘Love, Poverty and War’
It is above all in the present democratic age that the true friends of liberty and human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs. In such times there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity. Alexis de Tocqueville
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it. Woodrow Wilson
The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbours, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, ‘Are we free?’ I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer? Gerry Spence, Give Me Liberty
Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate: only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty! You the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure! Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world. Charles Chaplin
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization. Sigmund Freud
Small tyrants, threatened by big,
sincerely believe
they love liberty. W H Auden
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H L Mencken
All government, of course, is against liberty. H L Mencken
Most people want security in this world, not liberty. H L Mencken
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone. H L Mencken
The risks of liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness are another matter. George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance
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, The Law
No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session. Gideon John Tucker
The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell’s 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface.
Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars. Paul Joseph Watson
The story of liberty is a history of the limitation of a government power, not the increase of it. William J Federer, Change to Chains
Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Abraham Lincoln
To deprive a man of his natural liberty and to deny to him the ordinary amenities of life is worse than starving the body; it is starvation of the soul, the dweller in the body. Mahatma Gandhi
He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. Thomas Paine
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
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure. Aldous Huxley
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain. Marquis de Sade
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them. Mark Twain, Following the Equator
This is why I say it’s the ballot or the bullet. It’s liberty or it’s death. It’s freedom for everybody, or it’s freedom for nobody. Malcolm X
We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level — to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. No-one from the outside world can speak out in your behalf as long as your struggle is a civil-rights struggle. Civil rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country … You spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don’t even know there's a human-rights tree on the same floor. Malcolm X, speech Cleveland, Ohio, 3rd April 1964
There’s no place to go. We’re going to have to turn and we’re going to have to confront Big Brother and we’re going to have to struggle if we’re going to maintain our individual liberties and freedom. Jim Marrs
In the mid-fifties in America the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. In Montgomery Alabama in 1955 a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the all-white section of the city bus. Rich Hall’s ‘The Dirty South’ ***** BBC 2010
We shall not be moved. Labour and civil rights song 1931