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No Democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minors.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society.
~ Walter Lippmann
I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.
~ Thomas Jefferson
The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
~ John Locke
The moments of freedom, they can’t be given to you. You have to take them.
~ Robert Frost
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
~ Albert Camus
If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his house, what book he may read or what films he may watch.
~ Justice Thurgood Marshall
The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Who knows? Maybe my life belongs to God. Maybe it belongs to me. But I do know one thing: I’m damned if it belongs to the government.
~ Arthur Hoppe
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
~ William James
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
~ John K. Galbraith
We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.
~ Henry Kissinger
The art of power and its minions is the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.
~ Henry Clay
The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.
~ George Eliot
Moralizing and morals are two entirely different things and are always found in entirely different people.
~ Don Herald
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
~ Mark Twain
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. 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
Distrust in men in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
What I’d like to see the police do is deal with important issues and not these sorts of victimless crimes when society is riddled with problems.
~ Alderman Rodney Barker
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
~ Bertrand Russell
Moral indignation: jealousy with a halo.
~ H. G. Wells
Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another’s beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them.
~ Joshua Liebman
The most efficacious method of dealing with deviancy is to ignore, to the furthest point of our tolerance, those items which we find offensive.
~ Gilbert Geis
Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.
~ John F. Kennedy
Many politicians are in the habit of laying down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. This maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
~ Thomas Babington Macaulay
Idiot, n . A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
~ Ambrose Bierce
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