Category: Thought

Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (April 4, 1819).

It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or of remedying it.

Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1848), p. 105.

Political liberty . . . has not only a meaning of abstention, but a meaning of participation. If in one sense it is a sheer negative, and a doctrine of rights, in another sense it is thoroughly positive, and a gospel of duties.

John Morley, Voltaire (London: Macmillan and Company, 1885; 1897), p. 80.

No federal legislation prior to 1812 placed any restriction on the right of suffrage in consequence of the color of the citizen. From 1789 to 1812 Congress passed ten separate laws establishing new Territories. In all these, freedom, and not color, was the basis of suffrage.

James Abram Garfield, speech at Ravenna, Ohio (July 4, 1865).

It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double-tongues.

“Ten Bears” in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as performed by Will Sampson and written by Phil Kaufman and Sonia Chernus, based on the novel The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales by Forest Carter.

Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.

Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1848), p. 21.

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

John Morley (1838–1923), On Compromise (1877).

Some of us are simply a bit bored of hearing people ripping at closed wounds and then crying about their presumed hurt.

Douglas Murray on Piers Morgan Uncensored, discussing reparations for slavery.

Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.

First words of A Frolic of His Own (1994), William Gaddis’s fourth novel.

Make no mistake: It is socialism which lies at the end of this rainbow and, in this rainbow, the predominating color is the red of federal deficit spending under which a whole new generation of Americans has grown and developed.

Sen. Harry F. Byrd, as quoted in a newspaper’s three-dot column some time in the early 1960s.