Category: Thought

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.”

William Shakespearen, Julius Caesar (1599), Caesar, Act II, scene ii.

“The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.”

Lord Acton, Letter to Mary Gladstone (April 24, 1881).

“The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.”

Lord Acton, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” 1877.

“Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity.”

Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Lecture, 2010

“You can’t make facts fit the rules, it is the other way round. The rules have to be adopted to fit the facts.”

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Time of the Hero, 1963

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?”

I believe the preservation of our civil liberties to be the most fundamental and important of all our governmental problems, because it always has been with us and always will be with us and if we ever permit those liberties to be destroyed, there will be nothing left in our system worthy of preservation.

Earl Warren, as quoted in Lawyers Guild Review, Vol. 13-14 (1953), p. 47.

“Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world.”

Earl Warren, as speech at Columbia University, January 14, 1954

“Then join in hand, brave Americans all!
By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall.”

John Dickinson, The Liberty Song (1768).

“A watchful eye must be kept on ourselves lest while we are building ideal monuments of Renown and Bliss here we neglect to have our names enrolled in the Annals of Heaven.”

James Madison Letter to William Bradford (9 November 1772).