Leslie > Leslie's Quotes

“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”
― Edmund Burke

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
― Samuel Johnson

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

“Never apologise for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologise for the truth.”
― Edmund Burke

“Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.”
― Edmund Burke

“The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.”
― Edmund Burke

“You will smile here at the consistency of those democratists who, when they are not on their guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst, at the same time they pretend to make them the depositories of all power.”
― Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
― John Milton , Areopagitica

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
― Patrick Henry

“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.”
― Emma Goldman

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin

“Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.”
― Bruce Coville

“The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”
― James Madison

“The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.”
― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means

“The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
― James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787

“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.”
― Friedrich von Hayek

“If socialists understood economics they wouldn't be socialists.”
― Friedrich Hayek

“Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.”
― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

“Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions and will receive praise or blame for them. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.”
― Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

“Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.”
― Friedrich Hayek

“I am pursuing Truth, and am indifferent whither I am led, if she is my only leader.”
― Benjamin Rush

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
― Plato

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
― George Orwell, 1984